Yeah, who ever said anything about building a connected national network of high-speed trains across an entire continent?
That's exactly the ultimate objective, and that's the way it has to be. The last thing you want is a bunch of disconnected, short to medium distance "high-speed" corridors between select destinations - but little or no rail transportation connecting them. For instance, in Florida not everyone is traveling solely between Miami and Orlando (in the HSR proposal); Some people may board in Tampa who need to go to Jacksonville or Savannah. Should we really expect them to take the train to Orlando, get off and board a bus (or fly) to Jacksonville, then get on another train to Savannah? That would never work, obviously, and is one of probably thousands of such examples nationwide.
That doesn't mean that every segment of passenger railway needs to be "high-speed" rail. On the contrary, what most of the country needs first is a program of incrementally improved conventional passenger rail, with the goal of faster, greatly expanded, and more reliable service. There are many different plans (and proposed routes) for high-speed rail in America, but if you did have such a train from Miami to Orlando in the future, then you certainly must have conventional train service connecting north to Jacksonville and points north and west. This connecting service should (as a
very general rule) at a minimum have 3-5 trains per day at speeds between 79 and 110 mph. This can be done at a relatively modest cost, especially when compared to big-ticket investments such as true HSR.
If you need to go more than 250 miles, you should fly.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that high-speed trains are competing timewise with airplanes and therefore the only place they can 'win' is in short-distance corridors where - combined with th extra time needed to get to the airport, through security, and actually on the plane then make the flight - the train can get just as fast. A train with a top speed of even 110 mph could conceivably beat the plane on a 250 mile route, but in any event it is not air travel but the automobile which is the passenger trains primary competition. You don't have to beat the planes schedule when you aren't competing on time anyway. People who want to fly, should fly. The train may sometimes attract more people from buses (or perhaps even some people who otherwise wouldn't have made the trip at all, without train service) than it gets from the air.
Even at 200MPH, all those trains would take triple or quadruple (or more) the amount of time it takes to fly from Chicago to Orlando.
Again, especially on longer distance connecting train services, you are not attempting to compete timewise with air travel (and even a conventional 79 mph train will easily beat driving times on such a route). Improved conventional train services (and in this example, restoring the Chicago to Florida train route) can, again, be made much faster and more frequent than today for a reasonable cost, so even if in the future its still an overnight or all-day trip somewhere, more air passengers will start to decide the time savings aren't worth the hassles of flying, and opt for the slower train (this happens already).
Not to mention that in the short 20 mile hop from MCO to WDW, with at least one stop in between at the convention center, an expensive high speed rail system couldn't get going beyond the 75 MPH that a far cheaper conventional rail system could travel for a tiny fraction of the price
Correct. Actually, the entire Tampa to Orlando proposal should have been for a conventional passenger railway, built on improving existing freight-shared rail infrastructure, at a fraction of the cost of the HSR proposal. The airport to WDW should have been light-rail.
Finally, the Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail project
may have been dead before Governor Scott rejected it. Service from Jacksonville to Miami (along the east coast) is supposedly still a go, but apparently that's being looked at again now too, along with Sun Rail, both thought to be a done deal.
The entire federal program of high-speed rail projects has been so mismanaged and so poorly implemented it has set the prospects for passenger rail development in the United States back years.
There is an extreme outside chance it could still happen, but at this point I'm not holding my breath.
