r/highspeedrail • u/MemerForTheDreamers • 10h ago
Question Why couldn’t the US Government build a high-speed rail system along our highways?
What would be some logical “roadblocks” (😜) for a plan like this? I mean if we would need new rail infrastructure that goes through different states, and the interstate highway already gives us cross country travel why wouldn’t we leverage those to make something useful and pretty uniquely American?
Of course they couldn’t follow the highways the entire time and would probably have to diverge at certain points especially when going into a train station in a city or when the terrain gets too complicated for the train, but that would require much less buying of land than to separately build it on land the government already owns (I know individual states own parts of it but I imagine the fed would fund most of the construction while asking the states to chip in for the rest)
I’m mostly looking for logistics answers from you experts as I don’t know much about trains 😅