DC to NYC Maglev - Private investors?

http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/03/news/economy/high-speed-rail/index.html

a group of private investors is seeking to do what the federal government has been trying to pull off for years: bring super fast trains to the United States.

One working plan calls for 300-mile-per-hour train that floats on magnets to run from downtown Washington, D.C., to Manhattan. The train, faster than anything currently in operation, would make the trip in about an hour -- or nearly three times as fast as Amtrak's Acela service.

"You could live in Baltimore and commute to New York City faster than you could from Connecticut," said Wayne Rogers, head of Northeast Maglev, the group championing the project. "It changes real estate prices, how people live, where they work. It really changes the world."

The train itself is built around a Japanese technology known as magnetic levitation. Instead of wheels riding along a rail, maglev uses powerful, electrically charged magnets to suspend the train midair inside a U-shaped guide rail built on either side of the track.

...

Northeast Maglev estimates the New York to D.C. route could cost over $100 billion. Much of the money would be spent on tunnels and elevated track necessary in such a densely populated area -- possibly tunneling under cities and then running over or adjacent to Interstate 95 in more rural areas....

the group is starting small, aiming to construct a 38-mile section from the Baltimore airport to downtown D.C. within the next 10 years. With funding from U.S.-based private investors, they've already spent $40 million on the engineering and have applied for permits from the state of Maryland. They've been promised $5 billion in funding from the Japanese government -- which is keen to export the technology -- and plan on raising the rest of the money through the private capital markets

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I'm highly ambivalent on this project for a whole host of reasons...the main one being that it comes across as a bad use of money.

One thing that is interesting here: The segment is now being given as "Baltimore Airport to downtown DC"...so basically, this is a longer version of the Shanghai maglev to start with. That isn't a big money loser, but it's not where I would throw my money...I'd take a bond with AAF or Texas Central before I'd take one with these guys.

If the train runs from BWI to DC only, I expect it to be a marginal success: It'll do wonderfully in terms of commuter ridership, but it won't be much of a financial success. I suspect downtown Baltimore-downtown DC will be a bit more successful if that can come to pass (essentially converting Baltimore into an inner suburb of Washington in terms of commute time...it'd be quicker to get from downtown DC to downtown Baltimore than from downtown DC to Bethesda most of the time), but this line doesn't have much in the way of major success prospects unless it can get up to the Philly area or serve somewhere that it's not almost totally redundant with existing service.

One thing I have to wonder about is what the impact would be if these guys, instead of going for a mostly-redundant line like this, had a serious sit-down with Illinois, California, or another state that's been looking in this direction for a while (I'd suggest LA-SF, but they're already committed to the HSR project; with that said, LA-Vegas would be a reasonable direction to look...and frankly it would probably be a lot cheaper than trying to knock their way into Manhattan...). The NEC is horridly built-up most of the way, the Wilmington-Baltimore gap notwithstanding, in many respects.