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[quote user="futuremodal"]Lest we forget, at one time in this country fast freights were approaching 100 mph sustained speeds using 1930's technology. [/quote]I think that's not sustained in the historical record.  Years ago in grad school I spent a couple of weekends reading every article in Railway Age on so-called "mainliner" and redball freights from the 1920s through the 1940s and I came away with a starkly different impression than you have.  "Fast freight" then seemed to be anything that could maintain 35 mph average speed including intermediate terminals, which when you think about it isn't all that easy. The labor input required to sustain fast-freight schedules in the 1920-1970 era were staggering and probably were not financially feasible even then, let alone now. It is true that the railfan press tends to protray the exceptional as the typical especially when it can do dual-duty as a lesson from wise elders to callow youth, and if one's knowledge of railroading were limited to the pages of Trains, Railroad, Railfan, and the flossy color-picture books and Beebe & Clegg potboilers one could be very poorly educated indeed.  I like the TGV trains very much -- my first experience riding Thalys in France and Belgium a few years ago was an eye-opening object lesson in the lameness of the Acela and the current long-distance American passenger rail institution in general.  But I don't think there's anything about TGV that can be translated meaningfully to North America without first making wholesale changes in social structure, politics, economics, and maybe history too. S. Hadid
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