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You could have a very long train, because your train basically costs $100M per mile also. It doesn't cost any more to make a larger train. These trains could hold thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people. For a long straight run done by a lot of people all at once, such as LA-Vegas, it's very economical. $50 a seat x 3000 passengers is $150K a trip. Total cost in energy is very low, per passenger. Somewhere around $1. About 10 million people a year do the LA-Las Vegas trip, so $50 x 10,000,000 = $500 Million per year, each way. So, you'd gross 10 miles a year of track, the trip is 200 miles so 20 years to return your investment (gross). You'll have other costs such as employees, security, etc.

Not to mention you could have dynamic loading, so you could carry cargo, etc, which you could charge more for. A Typical Person is 180 pounds, so you could move cargo at the same rate for 27 cents per pound, well below truck rates..Fedex charges $1.85/pound at 10,000 pound packages...

Vegas has the I-15 corridor, why not fill the empty seats with cargo that's going anyway? And I heard they could move customs processing to Vegas also. So the ships in Long Beach could unload right onto this thing and customs, warehousing, etc can be done on cheap land in the middle of the desert. Take all the truck traffic off the coast (except local) and you'll have a mighty pleasant place to live..

The problem with trains since the beginning has been the continental divide. Check out BNSF's route maps. You have three major crossings, the hi-line (ID-MT), medium line (UT-CO) and low line (AZ-NM). But notice there is no midwestern North-South route that follows I-15. This area is mainly high desert and represents the next major boom area of the U.S., in 10-20 years.

East Coast has many opportunities for a fast train, it's surprising they don't have much yet.

Passenger trains have priority over freight on BNSF rail. The only exceptions are the guaranteed loads we carry between Thanksgiving and Christmas. UP on the other hand...

Well, you can try asking for one. The railroads (in the US) are hiring right now due to the combined effects of the recent economic upswing and new retirement rules, which caused an unexpected surge in early retirements. Here's some sites to check out:
Demand clogs traffic, profits for Union Pacific
Union Pacific website
BNSF website
and more

How about comparing modern day cars, trains, busses, and planes, on a per-passenger basis?

According to Top Gear a few nights ago, trains get worse mileage than the average car, per passenger(I'm trying to find any info about the study online to see if that's based on maximum capacity of each type of vehicle or real-world average passenger counts) and a high speed train gets worse mileage than a jumbo jet!

For freight there's no doubt that diesel locomotives are the winner. Diesel locomotives are hybrid vehicles: a 2-stroke diesel generator, but electric motors. They are very efficient at moving large loads, not so good at light loads due to the weight of the loco itself (something like 135 tons). That's why passenger trains tend to be purely electric - to keep the huge weight of the generator off the train.

Here are some links:

HowStuffWorks article on diesel locomotives.
A CN Railroad page claiming a diesel locomotive can travel 3.5 times further than a truck on a gallon of fuel (presumably pulling equivalent loads).
A BNSF Railroad page claiming fuel efficiency of approx. 750 GTM (gross ton miles) per gallon. Most high efficiency cars would probably weight a ton or less so a 50 MPG Prius would be about 50 GTM per gallon.

747s average about 0.2 miles per gallon for a reasonable-distance flight. When you figure in their larger passenger capacity, it costs significantly less fuel to transport a passenger in a 747 than it does to transport a passenger in even a fully-occupied SUV.

To burst your bubble a little more, diesel-powered trains are significantly more efficient than planes or cars. A representative example would be the aggregate fuel efficiency of Burlington Northern, a large freight railroad. 751.2 GTM (gross ton-miles per gallon) in 2003 for their entire fleet of trains. We'll stick with the previous poster's comparison to the Cadillac Escalade EXT. With a gross curb weight of 3175kg (3.5 standard tons) and highway fuel efficiency of 16 miles per gallon, the Escalade weighs in with a whopping 56.0 GTM.

So, freight trains are 13.41x as fuel-efficient as Escalades. Now that must be a surprise...

Here's a quote from a Chinese Web Site... "If we continue on the traditional growth path, energy consumption in China will surge to 3.3 billion tons of standard coal by 2020 from the current 1.4 billion tons" Here's another quote, from an American Publication "Total U.S. coal consumption is also projected to increase from 1.07 billion tons in 2002 to 1.57 billion tons in 2025, and production from 1.1 billion tons to 1.54 billion tons." Perhaps on a per-capita basis we're outrunning them...but on a country-wide scale they are already out-burning us 1.4 gtons to 1.54 gtons. We (ya, the USA) are in the midst of scaling back our use of coal through lots of draconian rules that have devastated regions of the country...China shows little sign of backing off on their use. Think about it...in less than 20 years they will have more than doubled their use of coal...in around 20 years, we will have increased our use by around 57%. Coal is a way of life in China, have you ever seen the little coal cakes that people use to heat their houses? There was a program on PBS the other night that showed little shops everywhere liquefying the coal and making the pressed-and-dried blocks. One guy mentioned he could heat his house for the winter for about $25. They will not stop doing that to retrofit to bottled propane or dig up their cities to put in natural gas.

Large Railroads of North America:
Union Pacific
Burlington Northern Santa Fe
CSX
Norfolk Southern
Canadian National
Canadian Pacific
Kansas City Southern
And then there's Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern, which wants to became a bigger player in the transportation market through their proposed powder river expansion project

And it's all run without your tax dollars.

Actually, this is ancient news. BNSF agreed to stop DNA testing way back in February. I don't know why it took so friggin' long for the newspaper to pick this one up.

Actually, this is ancient news. BNSF agreed to stop DNA testing way back in February. I don't know why it took so friggin' long for the newspaper to pick this one up.