While the US is a big country, that doesn't mean we have to link Seattle to Miami or LA to NY with high speed rail. At those distances it's far better to fly than take the train. Case in point: does it really make sense to take the train from Madrid to Moscow or from London to Istanbul? I mean it could be done, but it's probably faster to fly at that point.

But at the other way around, do we really need to fly to get between cities that are about 500 miles apart? Do we really need to be reliant on dinky little commuter jets to get between Boston and NY or all those cramped 737s to get between LA and San Francisco? It's just like going from Madrid to Barcelona or from London to Paris.

It's pretty much like the old saying goes, "there are the right tools for the right job."

In that light, there are certain corridors where intercity rail could work. A good one is the NE Corridor which we have Amtrak Acela, the closest thing to intercity rail like they have in Europe. Other possibilities are San Diego-LA-San Francisco, Portland to Seattle (perhaps maybe to Vancouver, BC?), the Texas Triangle of Dallas-Austin-San Antonio, and Chicago-St. Louis.

But sad to say, even if we have a supposed intercity high speed rail plan in the works, we're probably more than 50 years away from full agreement from both left and right sides that this is a good idea for the future of our country.

For the most part we're still bent on building bigger and better interstate highways, keeping gas cheap, and clogging more of our airports with dinky commuter jets. When most Americans think about trains, they have the image of choo-choo locomotives: