Well, it has potential

Those who've known me only during/since college might be a little surprised to find that growning up I was, and so some extent still am, a hard-core railfan. Yup, railroads, especially the 'glory days' of steam engines, are something I find fascinating, beautiful, and (important to my engineer's brain) practical and replete with fine mechanical engineering.

I'll admit my membership in NARRP has long since expired, and I couldn't even find my mileage log for the last train trip I took, but I still love the rails.

So I feel compelled to give overdue credit for pushing an upgrade to the sad state of long-distance passenger travel in the US to PBHO's administration. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/A-Vision-for-High-Speed-Rail/
I discovered this initiative just today.

What I'm not sure of is just how much horsepower is behind this. On the one hand, PBHO has his hands full trying to ruin healthcare in this country, declare one of the principle gasses I exhale a harmful polutant to be taxed, and generally mucking up our economy by printing money. On the other hand, even Amtrak has managed to squeeze budget dollars for the Acela service in the Northeast Corridor. If Amtrak can find the money for new equipment, you know the time for it has come.

In fact, I've been half-expecting a push for high-speed medium and long-distance passenger service in this country ever since 9/11. The technology was there even before that (I have a t-shirt bought about the X-2000 when it did demo trips in the Northeast Corridor back in 1993), and it seemed like the jumpstart it needed might have arrived in finding something that made air travel even LESS customer friendly. (See my various rants about the utter uselessness and in some cases INcreased risk of air travel under the TSA.)

Of course, $13 billion, while hardly spare change even in these days of trillion dollar deficit spending packages, is still only a tiny fraction of what the Federal Government puts annually into the interstate highway network, while remaining an order of magnitude more than Amtrak's current budget.

So is this a sop to common sense that will be abandoned in the compromises over health miscare, or a massive boost to the passenger rail industry? Neither? Both?