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300 miles is the length for which high speed rail can be competitive with airplanes and highways! 1 - Dallas is the regional financial hub for the southwest. A Dallas-Austin-San Antonio HSR and a Dallas-Oklahoma City-Tulsa as separate spokes to the hub. HSR would not be competetive with flying for the Tulsa/San Antonio endpoints. 2. - Some elements of the Fed's HSR plan for the Piedmont are justifiable. Atlanta-Charlotte should be the top prirority. But 1,500 long HSR routes are not practical. One of the major operating defieciencies of Amtrak's NE Coridor is their trying to operate it as one corridor. NE Directs and even Acela trains that lose time south of Phil. delay service to New England and vise versa. Operate the NE Corridor as Boston-Phil., southern Connecticut-DC and DC to Richmond. 3 - If a route is longer than 300 miles it is courting potential disaster. For example, Chicago to Minneapolis is 400 miles via the present Amtrak route. Diverging to serve Madison WI adds another 50 miles. Diverging to serve Rochester MN adds another 50 miles. The interstate freeways in the Midwest (outside of the metropolitan centers) work very well, so the auto is much more of a competitor than it is in th Northeast. Similarly no one would use the circuitous Chicago-Kansas City route via St. Louis, but develop them as two corridors and they could well be successful. It could very well be that HSR should be developed as several unconnected hubs. Regional hubs that are hundreds or thousands of miles from each other are the province of the airplane. We can still have a national rail passenger network, but it would involve turning all the Superliner long hauls into autoveyer trains - cooperate with the motorist! Many of the missing corridors don't have political sponsorship in Washington. On the other hand, the ones that are on the list that don't belong have sponsorship.
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