[Beta_Magellan]

The question is whether it’s worth going ahead with improvements that lead to 110-mph travel, or whether we should just go ahead with 220-mph. 110 mph seems like it has an advantage in terms of capital costs and, using the Chicago-Minneapolis corridor as an example, it makes a lot of sense if your main concern is with relatively short trips like Chicago-Milwaukee, Minneapolis-Rochester, or Milwaukee-Madison (for the sake of this post, I’m ignoring the existence of Scott Walker). However, the travel market for Chicago-MSP dwarfs these smaller markets, so to me it makes the most sense to concentrate on trying to link the two places as effectively as possible. This would be best done with 220-mph rail. Assuming 110-mph rail averages 80% of its top speed, the 417-mile trip from Chicago to MSP would take about 4:45, which is a definite improvement over driving and the current rail trip but doesn’t come close to being competitive with air travel. SNCF estimated a 2:45 trip for true HSR between Chicago and Minneapolis, which would, including door-to-door times for both air and rail, be about 5 minutes shorter than air travel; I can’t get the Midwest HSR site to load (surprised it was still up as of a couple weeks ago, actually), so I’ll assume an extra 10 minutes for routing the line to Rochester and LaCrosse instead of SNCF’s preferred Eau Clair alternative, bringing door-to-door time to five minutes longer, which I’ll assume is still competitive with air travel.

Unfortunately, there’s basically no way to get from 110-mph to 220-mph unless you’re building a 110-mph greenfield route with upgrades in mind (Minneapolis-Rochester being the prime example of this)—true HSR requires infrastructure that’s mostly separate from existing rail. I don’t see, then, how “getting a train faster than driving” is a necessary first step—at best you’re connecting a lot of places that wouldn’t see HSR (small towns+Bloomington-Normal on the Illinois Lincoln Service upgrade), at worst you’re throwing money at improvements that you hope will be made obsolete in the near future. And I haven’t heard much about private interest in running 110-mph lines in this country, either, whereas California and Florida’s HSR proposals have attracted ample attention.