As for "far apart" this seems irrelevant. Ohio has a greater population density than does Spain, but Columbus, Ohio's principal city, hasn't had a passenger train in 42 years while Cordoba, with half the population, enjoys ten trains per hour service including a high-speed train to Sevilla, Madrid, and Malaga. Anybody could build a Columbus-Dayton-Indianapolis high-speed rail line but we lack the will to do it.
I made it to our destination across the town from the Madrid central 45 minutes before she did.
Train service now has a marketshare of 46-30 vs flying, and widening. I'm certain it was reversed before.
People like fast center-to-center connections.
https://www.rbb24.de/wirtschaft/beitrag/2018/12/vde8-deutsch...
Right now train travel is cheap if you plan ahead and have the right discount cards and some flexibility regarding time. Otherwise, not so much. But then again, this is true for flying as well.
The problem with the US Midwest is that there's a lot of these third-tier cities, but you have to go out of your way to connect them. Who wants to go between Columbus and Indianapolis--the highway between the two cities is pretty empty. Even worse, the few collinear city triples you can come up with all completely miss the primary destination of the entire region, Chicago. If you want to go from Chicago to Columbus, Indianapolis, and especially Dayton, are not on your way.
The point about collinearity is that you can make a strong demand by combining many individually weak demands. And this is the problem in the Midwest: the strong demand is Chicago, and it has a lot of moderate demand endpoints, such as St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit. But the real strong city pair is Chicago/NYC, which is already at the extreme margins of acceptable time, which means substantial detours to hook up the lesser demand centers is going to kill ridership.
This strikes me as the main problem with the mindset around HSR. Consider e.g., Madison, Wisconsin.
Milwaukee would have a much more vibrant and dynamic ecosystem if undergrads/PhD students/professors could get to/from meetings with investors in MLK/CHI and be back for afternoon classes. Or continue internships/meetings during the school year.
There are enormous inefficiencies (and corresponding brain drain) caused by the fact that the region's center of innovation is 1+ hours by car away from the region's center of finance.
An MLK <-> CHI <-> Madison rail line would change the dynamics of the entire state's economy. Simply counting cars on the roads between those cities in the present ignores how HSR changes the entire dynamic in a very qualitative way.
Rail is expensive to build and maintain, and stations even more so. The lack of freedom of a car means the train must stop where people want to go and this creates a lot of complexity in how routes are connected, the size and number of trains, service hours, total throughput, ticket prices, and most critically having effective last-mile transit so people can actually get to the station to use the train.
Ride sharing may fill that last-mile today but overall the US is too big and spread out both between and within cities to for trains to be as viable as they are in Europe where everything is much closer together.
I don't think distance is a relevant factor: train tracks cost about the same as a two-lane highway while having higher capacity. Stations are fairly expensive, but when locations are far apart that's not a significant factor.
The bigger problem is that you can't profitably service low-demand routes with trains. Trains excel on high-demand routes but when you only want to move 20 people per hour a road has much lower operating costs.
If a new bus line is made available users are likely going to slowly convert to using it - and an area with good bus service is going to encourage residents[1] that want to take advantage of that service.
[1] In the history of the US, for example, train stations literally grew their own demand in many cases, causing non-existent or tiny towns to grow due to the availability of service.
Two major cities with high traffic between them can seem ideal but still not work out because people need effective last-mile transport too, and they have other places where they want go that requires a car.
The problem shared between both is lack of walkability. Not insoluble but requires more tunnels or overpasses.
But, you can definitely reuse or expand the same right-of-way you had for some of the trunk highways and run rail alongside it.
There is no successful rail station anywhere on Earth that has any of that junk.
Elsewhere in this thread and in previous discussions there has been this notion that there isn't the room for rail, buying up the land would be too expensive and so on.
For a lot of the US interstate there is this huge median between the two directions of the highway. In Europe you are lucky if the median is the width of a lane, in the US it can be a vast distance to the opposing traffic. Why they didn't build the interstate system with rail lines down the middle just for service reasons is a reflection on the car mad thinking that went with the era.
If you are driving in a car then you have to hold this steering wheel thing the whole time. Any moment of inattention and your number is up. Rail just automates that problem away, no Elon Musk needed. It should be a no-brainer. You should be able to hop onto the interstate and put your car on a flatbed railcar and zip along at 125mph until your destination, halving your drive time and being able to read the paper for a couple of hours instead of spending our hours holding that round thing. Even if you had to wait half an hour or an hour for the next flatbed train thing then it would still be worth it.
There is usually some power line following an interstate highway. I know that power gets sent along at 100's of thousands of volts but why can't the train tracks be the power 'cables' too? With some redundancy built in.
As it turned out America has just rubber wheeled V8 things trundling along at 55 mph between cities, at every opportunity for efficiency this was denied. The aero of cars in America during the last century made bricks look like the perfect aerodynamic shape.
As a European the state of the railways is shocking. We know from our history books about the golden spike somewhere in Utah and how amazing the transcontinental railroad was. But then, until you go to America, you don't realise that they haven't updated the network since. The smallest branch line in Europe has two sets of tracks, commuter towns have four to let the fast trains through. But then in America you have thousands of miles where it is just the one set of tracks. The land is not a shortage problem and you just wonder why over the last century or so they haven't bothered to put in an extra set of tracks so train traffic can be 'bi-directional'. It makes no sense at all. Then, through the Rockies the train slows down to something like ten miles an hour to inch over some trestle bridge that looks like it is a prop from an old Western movie. But that is fast. The train - Amtrak - will stop off for an hour to let some coal train chunter through on the single line. That would never happen in Europe.
Once I waited 8 hours for a train in America. There were no other trains on the track of the passenger variety during that time. In the rest of the world 8 minutes of delay means you have been badly let down and deserve a ticket refund. 8 hours - really? No wonder nobody travels on Amtrak. It is a joke, a bit like they only put it on for disabled people and didn't get the memo about accessibility.
I'm moving from NYC to Denver, and their new light rail system seems like such an upgrade from the car-congested streets above a sweaty slow subway.