French train

I've often wondered why nothing like this exists in the US? Any thoughts or facts?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070403/wl_afp/francetransportrail_070403121835

In the U.S., we let our national rail service starve on the vine because transportation subsidies are un-American and go against all that is good about capitalism. But, we never really quantify the transportation subsidies for road and air travel that are indirectly provided in the form of highways and surface streets and in the form of airports, government and defense aviation research, and air traffic control systems. Amtrak may be basically competent, but it is priced over the cost of competing airlines and has all the romance of a trip to the Post Office.

I also think it is tough to get new high speed rail corridors established in the mid-Atlantic simply due to the population density.

However, I really wish we had trains like this in the southeastern US. If we had trains like this weaving cities like Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, and Tampa together, regional economic growth would be completely ignited. It's a 4 or 5 hour drive from Atlanta to anywhere. We could put the corridors in now when it's mostly a matter of cutting down pine trees and laying rail through rural areas. Imagine getting to the good stuff like beaches and great golf destinations in a couple of hours! 8)

There was an interesting article in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution about the testing of high speed mag-lev trains here in the U.S. They wanted to think about having them between Hartsfield-Jackson airport and Chattanooga. The mag-lev proponents were happy to predict that the cost might get down to $20 million dollars per mile. To me, that seems a quite excessive. Chattanooga is really a very nifty little city with a charming downtown, interesting battlefields, and an aquarium that I believe is much more educational than the one in Atlanta, but I certainly don't think it's worth $2.5 billion dollars to get folks there at 250+ miles per hour.