Winging It: Stimulus raises hopes for high-speed trains

Occasionally, a wise journalism professor once told me, being a reporter is almost like not working because of the fun you can have. If you've covered transportation for decades, the best of those "are they really paying me to do this?" days have come aboard trains going almost 200 miles per hour.

Now, I've taken some pretty exhilarating airplane rides as well. Like the one in a 1929 open-cockpit biplane over Chester County. And two in cockpit jump seats, one in a British Airways 747 between the Philadelphia and Newark airports, the other in a 100-seat Midway Airlines jet bouncing down an ice-covered runway as it landed in Philadelphia.

But nothing quite matches the thrill of watching from the engineer's vantage point on a French TGV train going 180 m.p.h., as another train approaches from the opposite direction at the same speed and then disappears behind you in seconds. It's even better than floating along at 200 m.p.h. aboard an experimental German magnetic-levitation train.

Those land-based experiences make me believe that Americans would fall in love with high-speed trains if they ever got them, first just for fun and then as a practical replacement for short, fuel-guzzling airline flights.

With a new administration in Washington, at least we're in another period of rising hope, similar to ones I've seen come and go repeatedly over the last 30-plus years, when the nation may be ready to invest in high-speed rail.

The $787 billion economic-stimulus bill that President Obama signed into law last week includes $8 billion, the most ever, for high-speed and other intercity passenger-rail projects.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) tried to characterize the funding as wasteful spending by saying, inaccurately, that it would be used to build a 300-m.p.h. magnetic-levitation, or maglev, line between Las Vegas and Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. The dreamers who have talked about building that system since the 1980s may apply for some of the federal money. But they certainly won't get it all, and the project may be among the least likely to get any.

There are more than a half dozen other corridors around the country - including Amtrak's line linking Boston to Washington through Philadelphia - where there is keen interest in high-speed trains and where some of the $8 billion could be put to work faster than on a California maglev line.

The legislation and other congressional decisions in recent months also provide hope that funding for Amtrak trains that we already have will grow in the next few years.

The Northeast is the only part of the country that already has relatively high-speed trains, with Amtrak providing sufficient competition to airlines that it has the largest share of passengers traveling between New York and Washington. Other proposed high-speed corridors would use the conventional rail technology of steel wheels on steel rail that Amtrak does.

The Northeast Corridor, however, isn't truly high-speed by today's standards. Amtrak's Acela trains reach their top speed of 150 m.p.h. on only short stretches because of curves in the line and commuter-train congestion; the average speed of Amtrak trains in the corridor is 83 m.p.h.

The state of California has the most advanced high-speed rail (not maglev) project going today, with a plan to link major cities with an 800-mile network of trains traveling as fast as 220 m.p.h. You can find how serious the project is at its Web site, www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/.

If the California system is built, it would rival those in France, Germany, Japan, and other countries that stopped debating the wisdom of high-speed trains in the 1960s or 1970s and just started building them.

In the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Transportation identified California and a dozen other states as places with corridors, with metro areas of sufficient size at either end, where fast trains would work well to take traffic off highways and out of the air.

There is interest in developing systems in several of those corridors, including one in Texas linking Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, and another in the Midwest connecting Chicago to Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

The left-leaning Progressive Policy Institute, in a research paper released just before Obama took office, argued for federal aid to high-speed rail as a way to create construction and other jobs, relieve air and highway congestion, save energy, and help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Paul Weinstein, the senior fellow at the institute who wrote the paper, told me that all $8 billion in new funding could be used on the Northeast Corridor without making trains a lot speedier because of the inherent curvature and congestion issues. He suggested that it would make more sense to spend on a single-state or regional high-speed project elsewhere, where the economic feasibility could be demonstrated and enthusiasm among political leaders and the public generated.

Some of you may recall that the Pennsylvania legislature created a high-speed rail commission in the 1980s that envisioned maglev trains zipping between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in an hour or two. A few years after it was created, funding ran out and the plan died.

Perhaps this time around will be different.