The closest thing to a state-of-the-art American passenger train is Amtrak's Acela Express, which runs between Boston and Washington at an average speed of just 82 miles per hour. Although the train can travel up to 150 miles an hour, it runs on track laid during the Civil War—rails that cannot support such high speeds. In the rest of the country, trains chug across the landscape at 50, 60, or 70 miles per hour—a pace that hasn't improved much since Jesse James stalked the rails. The United States spends between three and four dollars per person on rail travel, while other countries allocate 10 or 20 times that, and there are wide swaths of this country where it is difficult to find a train. Several proposed U.S. high-speed rail projects have been on the drawing board for years, mired in political squabbling and red tape because each would require laying new track and would cost billions of dollars.

Proponents say that if trains were taken as seriously in the United States as they are abroad, rail travel would be a viable transportation alternative to flying and driving on trips of up to 600 miles. Take the trip from St. Louis to Chicago, for instance—a distance of about 260 miles. An airplane flies the route in approximately an hour, but to that you have to add almost three hours in travel time—getting to the St. Louis airport, waiting in security lines, and getting from the Chicago airport to downtown. If you could hop on a high-speed train in St. Louis, Chicago would be an hour and a half away. But you can't. The Amtrak trains currently serving the route run at an average of just 53 miles per hour, and the trip takes five hours—about as long as the drive time.

Amtrak's Acela trains, which travel between Boston and Washington, D.C., have shown that when a high-speed rail network is built, passengers come—in droves. Demand for Acela is strong and growing. When the service was introduced in 2000, Amtrak had 45 percent of the passenger market between New York and Washington, D.C. That number has grown to 56 percent. Similarly, Amtrak's share of passengers traveling between Boston and New York has climbed from 27 percent to 41 percent. Acela, after all, is typically cheaper than a flight—especially when booking at the last minute—and it arrives on time more often than the airlines do. A round-trip walk-up fare between New York and Washington on Acela costs $300 to $400, while airlines can charge more than $600 for last-minute bookings between Washington's Reagan National Airport and New York's LaGuardia. The train arrives on schedule about 90 percent of the time, whereas just 62 percent of the flights from Reagan to LaGuardia got there on time last year.

The next high-speed rail pro-ject most likely to be realized is a proposed $42 billion line between San Diego and Sacramento. The train would whisk visitors along at about 220 miles per hour, a speed that would mean the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles could be done in two and a half hours. Total flying time between the two cities, including getting to and from the airport, is about four hours; driving takes at least six hours. And it is estimated that the train would reduce traffic by two million cars and would eliminate 12 million tons of greenhouse gases annually—and by 2030, it would generate twice as much revenue as it cost to build. The train fare would be $55 in each direction: That's less than what it costs to take a taxi from LAX to downtown.