Rail service isn't practicable in most of the country, even at 200 miles an hour, NY to Chicago is still a long long trip.
It takes about an hour total for transportation between downtowns and the airports; you need to be at the airport about an hour ahead of your flight; the flight itself is 2 and a half hours.
So, a 200mph train would be _faster_ for most travelers.
Assuming you can a) maintain that speed the entire length and b) there are no stops along the route. A long-distance point-to-point HSR system is simply not cost-effective, particularly when you've got a geographic barrier like the Appalachians. That's what makes Chicago so problematic for HSR: the Midwest ends up being a region where no city is particularly close to being "on the way" between any other city pairing.
Chicago to NYC is about twice that distance, so 5 hours should be obtainable
The "easy" route via the Erie canal (so Chicago/Cleveland/Buffalo/Albany/NY) is 950mi or so, which is simply getting too long to capture traffic. Going via Detroit and Niagara doesn't really add any time, and cutting the trip in half via Toronto would add some time, but you'd get two viable trip corridors out of it, if you could solve border control issues.
The most logical route is the Pittsburgh/Philly route, because you get the topography in your favor east of Harrisburg, reuse of corridor (Pittsburgh, Philly, and Harrisburg are all en route, not to mention the wye at Pittsburgh gives you basically Chicago/NYC and Chicago/DC on the same corridor). But this route is still 860mi, which is hard to keep to 5 hours.
~910 miles through Philadelphia -> Harrisburg -> Pittsburgh -> Cleveland;
~960 miles through Albany -> Buffalo -> Cleveland;
~1000 miles through Philadelphia -> Baltimore -> DC -> Pittsburgh -> Cleveland.
The route that touches DC is the one that passes through the most valuable intermediate stops, but most of that demand is intra-corridor and doesn't concern Chicago. Furthermore, DC is a logical place to serve as a hub to connect the two corridors: one a high-demand DC-NYC, and one a long-distance Chicago-DC. Since to go into Union Station, you have to double-back, this could be a two-segment train where you'd have one-seat travel between Chicago and NYC, but there would be a mandatory stop in DC. This all sounds good, but the segment between DC and Pittsburgh is awful: it's crowded with CSX freight trains, it's either hemmed in by populated areas or follows river valleys or narrow ravines, and there's much work to be done to bring it up to a state that can host High Speed Rail. Between DC and Pittsburgh, one would basically have to build a dedicated line for High Speed passenger rail.
The route through Albany and Buffalo avoids the Appalachians but is forced into the busy Hudson Valley. Route improvements here are expensive. East of Cleveland, the Upstate New York cities along the route simply don't generate enough Chicago-bound demand, nor enough connecting opportunities to make routing this way worthwhile.
The route of the old Pennsylvanian Railway through Philly, Harrisburg, Altoona, Pittsburgh is indeed the most logical 'direct' route, both in terms of macro and micro; most of the right-of-way is multi-tracked so even with the heavy Norfolk Southern freight traffic, it'd be competitive; and the route touches Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, all of which can generate local and connecting passengers. But even this route is substandard for High Speed Rail: most of it is in river valleys, where there isn't space for the overly broad, sweeping curves with large radii that are needed for high speed travel.
The gist is, between Pittsburgh and the Appalachian Great Valley -- home to Harrisburg and Hagerstown, on the routes going towards Philadelphia and DC respectively -- significant engineering effort (that I wrote about previously [1]) would be needed to cut down on travel time on what would become one of the most profitable segments of the route: between Western PA and the rest of the Northeast Corridor.
As for the Midwest, there are no convenient cities west of Cleveland to chain onto the route. Toledo or Fort Wayne are the most logical choices, but Toledo lacks north-south connections currently, while Fort Wayne is out of the way of the direct route and also lacks connections. Chaining them both along with South Bend would be best, but that's a complicated route that adds travel time.
Chicago/NEC isn't viable for HSR until 200mph at least, which means dedicated passenger rails, which means a new corridor anyways. The CSX route from DC to Pittsburgh isn't particularly great from this purpose. Of course, one of the issues with the Keystone to Harrisburg is that the wye is just north of Philly's station, so either you have to run the locomotive around in Philly or you bypass the stop entirely on the way to NYC.
In terms of engineering, the worst part is going to be the Ridge and Valley section of the Appalachians, roughly Blue Mountain to Bedford if you're following the PA Turnpike. The problem is that you have steep ridges very perpendicular to your direction of travel, which requires either detouring to find a water gap or tunneling through the base. Once you're on the plateau proper, passenger rail can easily handle the grades.
As for your final point: that's the big problem with the Midwest: pretty much nothing's colinear. In contrast, a straight line from from DC to Boston literally passes right through NYC [1] and very near Baltimore, Wilmington, Philly, Trenton, and New Haven, with Hartford, Springfield, and Providence a bit further off.
[1] When I drew it from the Capitol to Boston City Hall, the path over Manhattan was from roughly the northwestern corner of Lower Manhattan to the southeastern corner of Midtown Manhattan.
Flying is the best mode of long distance travel in the United States — you don’t have to pay for thousands of miles of track, instead you just need to focus on connecting to airports with the cities more efficiently.
With airplanes, you can route however you want, scaling with demand. But with a train: what happens if Chicago-NY becomes unprofitable? You’ve spent billions connecting cities rather than simply improving airports. Airports can serve all city pairs, a train is a permanent connection of city pairs.
It’s interesting how people here are ok with spending billions to run track, build stations, but nobody has brought up the simplest solution: improve airports and the airport UX. That would be cheaper and benefit more people — not just those living in a major city.
Over the past 6 months, I've spent nearly 60 minutes in security more than once due to equipment failure and/or understaffing.
Trains are a good backup to airports since airplanes can be grounded (or highly delayed) due to weather, security concerns, equipment problems at the airport, etc. Trains are not (generally) subject to the same concerns so make a good backup.
I was in Japan recently and my intercity flight to a city 300 miles away was canceled due to an incoming Typhoon. I was able to book a high speed train that got me in there to catch my flight (and depart before the typhoon hit that airport too).
When a blizzard hits NYC, all you can do is sit it out and wait for flights to resume and it can sometimes take days to find an available seat.
The real problem is:
- Not enough government funding for mass transit projects
- Not enough people supporting government funding
- Too much power at the city level and not enough power at the state/national level for transportation projects
- Terrible UX and not enough city-level public transit infrastructure. When you exit the train station in most of the above countries, you are greeted with a properly air-conditioned/heated waiting hall, delicious food, hotels within walkable distance, and buses/subway to anywhere you would need to go. In a LOT of US cities when you exit the train station you are greeted with a massive parking lot and not even so much as a restroom. (Okay, Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington are fine, but they are quite the exception. Most other cities suck.) Even if California gets the high-speed rail going any time soon to Los Angeles, the fact is that it's stupidly hard to get around anywhere in LA without a car, so I don't imagine it getting much ridership until that problem is solved (maybe by autonomous cars, maybe not).
Put another way, the distance between Chicago and New York is roughly 700mi as the crow flies. The distance between Edinburgh and London is 330mi, Calais and Marseilles 550mi, Zurich and Copenhagen 600mi, Milan and Calabria 600mi, Shanghai and Beijing 650mi, Hiroshima and Sendai 530mi. You're looking at a distance that's longer literally than the longest axis of most European countries, and at a much more sparsely populated region than the linear corridors of other countries that have axes that long.
NY/Chicago is on the edge of viability in terms of distance. As the crow flies, you're talking a 3½ hour trip minimum; as you actually build it, a non-stop express is looking like at least 4-4½ hours. The most feasible route with intermediate stops (via Pittsburgh and Philly) is around 860 miles, an even longer trip. If the trip were on pretty much flat, featureless terrain, the cost and time could both be kept small, but the mountainous terrain means you're generally on the worse ends of the estimate.
That's the biggest problem with the US: our cities are just simply too far apart for HSR to be viable in most of the country. And where they aren't, they tend to be in the worst pattern for utilizing HSR effectively.
Maglevs have reduced physical infrastructure limitations which give them higher theoretical top speeds. The problem is that the fixed infrastructure costs are way too high to be feasible for low-volume routes, and they are completely incapable of sharing their tracks with those low-volume routes, which means you need to carve separate approaches through the very high land values of large, dense cities.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/4/this-is-why-inf... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i... [3] http://fortune.com/2017/01/23/us-infrastructure-renewal-buil... [4] https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastruc... [5] http://theweek.com/articles/449646/why-expensive-build-bridg... [6] http://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/blog/is-u.s.-infrastructure-m...
Naw, the biggest problem is lack of strong centralized authority and planning. The California HSR debacle is a perfect example: death by a thousand cuts. Places like Belmont want to kill HSR with a variety of faux concerns (e.g. opposing electrification and grade separation due to noise concerns). Meanwhile in San Francisco politicians are still bickering over how to extend the tracks to the new transbay terminal (which is currently just a billion dollar bus station). And, of course, the California Republican delegation is trying to tank Caltrain electrification because one of the consequences is that electrification will help HSR. See Also: BART's Oakland Wye clusterfuck.
Or take a look at New York. The high speed train, Acela, is being strangled by Connecticut and MetroNorth. Average speed along the Acela route is 70 mph, give or take.
Meanwhile in Spain, RENFE is second only to China for amount of high speed rail. They're even in the process of switching from Iberian to "standard" gauge track (and even have trains that can switch track gauge without stopping). Meanwhile in New York... Penn station is… a mishmash of electrification projects (Amtrak, LIRR, NJT).
In fact, I think you're putting to much emphasis on time in motion versus time door-to-door. The big advantage that rail has over air travel is that you can build the stations in very central locations. New York is a great example with JFK all the way out in the boonies (unless you live in / are going to Queens) and Penn Station right in midtown. Being able to go from Penn Station to Union station right on the Loop could easily shave an hour off of your travel time... and the hassle of unpacking your bags and taking your shoes off. New York is also at a disadvantage with no easy options to add more flights to either of the New York airports (LGA, JFK).
Are you thinking of regional or long haul service? My experience was that the regional/commuter stations (RER, RENFE Cercanias) weren't particularly extravagant. Air conditioning, in my experience, is much less of a thing in Europe than the US.
In terms of American stations, Boston's Back Bay station (well, the platform for the commuter rail) is just gross. It's hot, dark, and sooty due to the diesel trains. IMO the San Francisco, and to some extent the rest of the Bay Area, does pretty well by American standards. Powell station has underground access to a variety of shops and whatnot, the SF ferry terminal is its own little posh mall, and even BART's latest mistake, the Warm Springs station, is actively being targeted for complementary development. Even Marin has the multi-modal station right in downtown San Rafael with a bunch of restaurants and shops within a two block radius.
I don’t think you have any idea how much it costs to run high speed rail lines through the mountains. It’s mind blowing expensive and difficult and the environmentalists seeem to lose their minds. Look at the history of the TGV for examples of how farmers and environmentalists obstructed that project for years.
- the dense cities with good intra-metro transit are either all already in the Northeast Corridor or somewhere else entirely and too far apart from each other: Chicago is much too far from NYC, DC, San Francisco, Seattle
- elsewhere, you find big metropolitan areas that are the right distance apart (~100-200 miles) but are impossibly spread out and have bad transit, such that only a small subset of your potential customers can get to where the station would be, or to where they're trying to go within the metro once they arrive; e.g. Texas Triangle (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston), Florida V (Tampa, Orlando, Miami), I-85 (Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh)
Really, Lake Ontario makes any NY-Detroit train line much longer than it could be otherwise.
VIA Rail advertises that its Toronto to Windsor service is a great alternative to driving and flying. It is 1 hour slower than flight and about equal to driving. Surely they can make some good improvements. EDIT - I just discovered that Ontario has committed to bring the Toronto to Windsor line to 200 km/h by 2025 and 300 km/h by 2031.
A brand-new bridge between Windsor and Detroit has already been approved. Canada is paying for 100% of it, why not add rail capabilities (like the Øresund bridge between Sweden and Denmark)?
The Detroit to Chicago Amtrak line runs at > 100 mph for almost the entire length already (paid for by the "car-friendly" state of Michigan). The major bottlenecks are two counties in Indiana that Pence hates. With him in Washington, he might still find a way to block construction, but then again he might be too busy to get involved in such piddly things anymore.
So basically, you just need to find a good way to speed up the current New York to Toronto Amtrak, which is 12.5 hours to go 350 miles!
Reaching the absolute minimum NY-Chicago travel time isn't necessarily the highest priority because at that distance you're not going to beat a plane and you're probably not going to see same day round trips. Instead making the line economical by including as many people as possible would make the trip cheaper for people who can't afford flying. You could even add stops in Philadelphia and Toledo, which aren't too far off course.