this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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I think people need to start defining what they mean with "high speed rail", because in Europe the high speed rail connections between larger cities are about the only ones profitable, so much so that it goes at the expense of regional medium speed rail connections. In addition the construction of the rail lines that allow to go faster than 200km/h are highly profitable as well and the money spend on that is missing for the maintenance of the normal speed regional rail links.
But I acknoledge that in many places regional rail that goes between 100 and 200 km/h is considered high speed rail.
The US really needs both. I'm only kinda aware of what you mean by medium rail, so I'll describe the four kinds of rail we have here.
First you've got subways and the like. It's generally a city itself, and largely concentrated in the urban core. Great examples are like NYC or Washington DC both of which are world class, less great examples are like Baltimore. These often overshadow busses in their areas.
Then you've got metropolitan area light rail systems, which hit suburbs though may require first and last mile bussing/hiking and may not hit every area. Seattle is a great example of this, with their building a light rail system largely connecting major districts of the city, suburbs, and cometropolitan cities. These and the subways can blend together, and can be thought of as the two extremes of short range rail.
Regional rail is what I suspect you mean by medium rail. It's also similar to metropolitan rail. The northeastern corridor is our only example. It's administered in conjunction between the state departments of transportation and Amtrak (the federally owned rail corporation). If you live in it you can just take a train to the city or town you want to go to. It just works and is a good end goal for metropolitan rail, but also only in one region.
Then there's long distance rail. It's all Amtrak and it fucking sucks here. It's slow, it's expensive, and it shares tracks with freight. Amtrak is routinely hindered from improving it. There are major cities it only departs from in the middle of the night. We focus on replacing it with high speed rail specifically at corridors not served by regional rail. The main proposals are New York to Chicago, both of which have local rail, or Los Angeles to Seattle which would hit multiple major cities with local rail.
You also have some major cities with none of these like Columbus. Regional rail isn't really on the table in much of the country right now so the focus is largely on high speed rail and metropolitan rail here. High speed to replace airplanes and uncomfortably short flights/uncomfortably long drives and metropolitan for commuters and alleviating traffic.
Yeah, those are profitable in Europe, but at the expense of everything else and they soak up all the state funding for rail infrastructure development. But they only go between major cities and rarely stop on the way because otherwise they can't compete with flights time wise.