Autoblog

Because the next Ferrari hypercar will do exactly 226, and Montezemolo didn't want to affect Ferrari sales :P

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If speeds his thing, Montezemolo should have invested in making a jet like Honda. The Honda jet does 483mph :P

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Yeah, but it wouldn't have VTEC! Just imagine the kick of that jet when VTEC kicks in.

Yo.

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They already raced the TGV to Nice. But since it's Top Gear and it's rigged, the car won.

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@why not the LS2LS7?

Depends on where your departure point and final destination are, and how long you have to commute before and after riding the train. I think high speed rail has no sense without a policy of efficient means of transportation within the cities connected (be it simply a big parking lot or taxi pickup points if the streets around the station aren't that congested).

For the Paris-Nice thing, one should know that the train doesn't go high speed on the whole way : Paris-Marseille is 300-320 kph but Marseille-Nice is about 120-140 kph (beautiful views on the Mediterranean sea, tho). As a result you spend almost as much time on both sections even if the last one is much shorter than the first (250 km vs. 700+).

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And on board the wind powered bullet train a crack team of scientists will come up with a cure for cancer using toothpicks and sticky tape.

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United states of America is incomplete without high-speed train.

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Umm guys, GM is the reason why we don't have a modern train based public transportation system that links the country. They weren't selling enough cars-in fact, they were losing money back in 1921. So GM, Standard Oil, Philips Petroleum, and pretty much every company that would make money if more cars were sold (glass companies, rubber companies, whatever), started a consortium to kill any rail competition and mass transit in as many cities as possible.
So that's why all our shipping is done by trucks instead of trains like many other countries, and our railroad system is a total joke compared to countries that are supposedly less advanced than us. It's kind of depressing when you realize that you can pick any random developed European, Latin American, or Asian country and it'll be guaranteed to have better and much faster trains than us.
Personally I wanna see us build some mag-lev trains...I rode one and it was pretty amazing looking at the info display and realizing I was going 240MPH on land.

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Because the gov't would somehow rather spend 700bn bailing out them bankers than spend much less on a cross-country maglev.

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O.P. - if you can explain why AmTrak has been losing money for over 2 straight decades then you've basically answered your own question.

America's habit and accessibility to driving + lower gas prices makes it, dare I say, inefficient to travel cross country on rail. It works in other parts of the globe because people need it... America doesn't need better trains we need better roads.

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costs are way to high
but as far as high speed trains the US does have at least one I know of, but it doesn't go far

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@Randy915

Upgrading roads is the dumbest idea ever. The reason why Amtrak is losing money is because they hardly get any funding. The NE Corridor itself is doing good though. The Acela train which goes up to only 150mph on 18miles of track holds 40% of the travel market between Boston & NY. It takes 2 hours and 55 minutes for it to make the trip. Paris to Brussels (the same distance) takes 1 hour 22 minutes with TGV trains running about 186mph. Imagine how much that travel market percentage would rise if Amtrak could offers such times.

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Tell me about it. With the sheer amount of people a single can can carry, If it is making the same city to city jump millions of people make daily, The fuel and price savings would far outweigh any initial investment to get said system up and running.

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