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[quote user="oltmannd"] <blockquote> <div>.  And one benefit to the railroads that seems overlooked (I fail to understand why) in the discussion is that moderate (up to 160 mph) high speed lines in China (which would be HSR to us) will share track with very fast freight.  The benefit?  Reclaiming a lot of high-value, high-priority freight currently handled by Fed-Ex, trucks, etc.  I don't think that potential new business is chump change, and as a shareholder interested in the longer range, I don't think it should be overlooked simply because it is a change from present vision.  If the founders of Fed Ex had looked at things with so little foresight, the company would have been stillborn.</div> <div style="clear:both;"></div>   </blockquote> In general, I don't think the numbers work.  The cost of moving high value truckload frt by HSR is probably worse than over the road team drivers and wouldn't be worth it unless you could wring whole days out of the door to door trip time.  A lot of this traffic already moves by rail on long haul lanes.  It's the shorter haul lanes where the opportunity lies and HSR for frt has little role to play.   There are probably some nice very small niches for frt on HSR, as long as they are viewed as incremental and not part of the base case for the route ecomonics. <div style="clear:both;"></div> [/quote] Yes, but do the numbers really need to work? If it is government, public sector, high-speed freight, why should it have to be economically cost competitive with trucking?  What if we had government fast rail freight just for the “greater good” of getting trucks off of the highways and reducing carbon dioxide?  That environmental objective happens to be the same objective being given for HSR by government spokesmen.  HSR is certainly not competitive or cost effective in any rational free market sense.  And because there is no market for HSR, only government can build it. And only the government can decide that we must have HSR, even if there is no market for it.
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