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[quote user="schlimm"] [quote user="oltmannd"]For trips of 300 mile or less, door to door times driving are roughly the same as flying, so for rail service to be competitive, it has to roughly equal the door to door driving time.[/quote]  Could be workable for even more than 300 miles.   For example, Chicago to Minneapolis/St.Paul (~400 miles), is a flying time of about 90 minutes.  Add to that getting to/from the airports to the downtowns (about 2 hours?) , allow the one hour for boarding, and you have ~4 1/2 hrs.   A train that can sustain 100 mph average would take about 4 hours.  If you drove it would take (according to Google) 6 hrs. 15 mins. for the 400 miles.  If one drives a bit faster, maybe that could be done in under 6 hrs.  Sound pretty competitive to me.  In pre-Amtrak days, the three competing rail routes managed the trip in just under seven hours.  A route between those two metro areas should probably include Madison as well as Milwaukee on the way to include maximum population.[/quote] This may be a good option for downtown to downtown travel.  However, if Chicago and Minneapolis are anything like Dallas and Houston, for example, most of the folks who are potential intercity travelers (bus, car, plane, or train) don't live downtown or near downtown.  And most of them are not going downtown.  Instead, they come from or are headed to one of the burbs.  Accordingly, if they are to take a train, unless they live on the side of town where the rail line runs, and the line includes a suburban station, they would have to get downtown to the railroad station, which would take as much time as a hypothetical trip to the airport.
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