Munich<>Frankfurt (400km) is 3 hours with ICE, much less than going to the airport, wait for check in, boarding, flight, off the plane and to the city centre. It's around 110e too for returns
Discount airlines are discount mostly because of tax incentive to develop small local airport around the EU. Of course they are popular. In the UK, from London, it is basically cheaper to get anywhere in the EU than anything north of Birmingham.
Remember, Chicago to New York City is almost the same distance as Munich to Moscow! (Note that rail advocates will tell you that Chicago to NYC is just barely in high speed rail range, anything farther even rail advocates don't pretend to be competitive. Chicago to New York City is not very far on the scale of the US, so of course we fly.
Yes I will agree that our rail system in the US isn't great, but flying doesn't compete with the rail system, driving does. A good rail system in the US would only negatively affect some short flying routes, it would however mean less people drove.
>Nobody flies between cities in one state
With some exceptions. Probably most notably SF to LA although there are probably other smaller in-state city pairs that are a long drive from each other especially in the western US.
If you bypass every other city between NYC and Chicago, and basically go through a state-long tunnel in Pennsylvania, you might be able to do it with a conventional railroad, but it definitely won't be cost-effective. To hit the other cities, you have to switch to maglev, which makes it cost-ineffective as well.
A final note: the city pair you're trying to link up is Chicago-NYC. Given the relatively diminutive size of the other cities en route (Pittsburgh is #27 and Cleveland #33, compared to #1 NYC and #3 Chicago), Chicago-NYC is going to make up the bulk of your traffic, so partial portions of the route aren't particularly effective. This is one of the issues CA has as well: the full SF/LA connection is where the market is, and the HSR can't justify its costs until it connects those two cities.
One of the reasons that the Northeast Corridor works so well for Amtrak is that people by and large are not taking the train from Boston to DC. (It's doable and I've done it but it really doesn't make sense versus flying in most cases.) In fact, it's usually a longer stop in NY Penn because most people are either getting on or getting off in Manhattan.
Rather, people are going Boston-NY, NY-DC, or otherwise between cities that make up about half or less of the total route.
DC (#6)
Baltimore (#21)
Philadelphia (#8)
NYC (#1)
Boston (#10)
You're connecting 4 major cities, and 1 in-between city, along the Boston to DC route, and the largest city is smack dab in the middle. In fact, as route pairings, it's less a Boston-DC line and more a DC-NYC and a NYC-Boston line that is through-run. Chicago-NYC only has the in-between cities of Cleveland and Pittsburgh en route (excluding the already-connected Philly).
The NEC is, quite frankly, extremely unusual in being a very dense, very linear corridor. The only other corridor in the world with similar circumstances is the Tokaido Shinkansen.
Exactly. Frankly, if the northern and southern legs of the route split to different rail stations as is the case in Boston, I'd guess that would inconvenience relatively few people.
(Of course, Amtrak has limited service going north out of Boston anyway so the fact that the Downeaster doesn't directly connect to the NEC is less of a problem there than it would be in other cities.)
It's too bad the Amtrak NE Regional (and the very slightly-faster Acela "Express") are so horribly inferior to the Tokaido Shinkansen. Riding on an Amtrak feels like a bad joke after riding on any Shinkansen line, in many ways, including both speed and price.
There is no technical problem getting a train to average 300km/h across the entire stretch. There are lots of political problems though. If we committed to building such a track in 10 years we could get the price of maglev track down a lot - and 10 years is what it would take the get the right of way and dig the tunnels.
These speeds are really not theoretical and we regurarly made use of them during travels in Japan. For example back in 2017 we traveled 1100 km from Beppu to Tokyo in about 8 hours. This contained a normal speed express train segment from Beppu to Fukuoka (1:30 h, max speed 130 km/h) and two train changes.
Also a maglev based line between Tokyo & Nagoya is under construction, which will be 80% underground with a running speed of ~500 km/h.
Another, more extreme, example: Oslo -> Tromsø: 1:50 by plane, no options for train on Google Maps, and 21:10-22:20 by car.
The second most popular route in the US is LA to SF.
That's the core issue. CHSRA never had a credible funded plan for building either crossing, and instead chose to tackle the easy part in the Central Valley first. Unfortunately, HSR in the Central Valley is effectively useless without a mountain crossing at at least one end.
Jesus, you say that with such confidence, Bravo! I’m afraid to tell you how popular the Houston/Dallas route is...