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I have been watching this subject as it has emerged in several threads here plus coverage in Trains, over the last year or so.  My general feeling about it that its significance has been largely underappreciated. Railfans seem to be the most enamored with HSR for obvious train reasons.  But HSR also has a fashionable “green” cachet, which makes it the darling of the news media.  For the same reason, HSR is also the darling of the Obama administration and the current congress.  Pushback is coming from the NIMBYS who don’t want new trains running through their neighborhoods, and from patriots who believe that the U.S. is spending itself over a cliff.  But the greatest conflict of all will be when the ideology of socialized passenger rail collides head-on with the capitalism of private U.S. freight railroads. Everybody has heard that the freight railroads are doing very well these days.  But, just when they have finally found their place in the sun, along comes a bully who wants something they have.  The private railroads have dealt with this bully before, but with deregulation, they thought they were rid of him.  But now the bully is back and he wants to run a whole new system of passenger rail overlaid onto the freight rail system. HSR needs corridors, but the creation of new corridors is beyond the dreams of even the HSR boosters.  So the only solution is to commandeer the private freight rail corridors for the public good.  There is almost a tone of public entitlement to the private freight corridors that one can sense in reading pronouncements from the FRA, for example.  They say that everywhere HSR needs to go, the freight railroads already have a corridor that goes there.  And they seem to imply that because the railroads were there first, they got the best possible corridor, and that is unfair to latecomers who also need a corridor.  The message seems to be that the freight railroads owe something to their county, so they should be good citizens and share their corridors for this new public good of HSR. The message to the U.S. freight railroads is this:  It is time to give back to your community.  Folks need transportation choices.  We must insist.
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