The GATEWAY project up in the Northeast to build a HSR line next to the existing Right of Way is supposed to cost $13.5B by 2020.
This would be all fine; except Amtrak has a $5.5b backlog of maintenance on the NEC and needs to cough up $12.3b over 15 years to replace 1,300 cars and 350 locomotives to maintain present service levels.
Think of all the money that's tied up in sexy sexy HSR that could revitalize a significant portion of Amtrak's fleet...
It's a matter of priorities. IMHO, on the NEC mainline we're looking at diminishing returns once you get the tracks straightened out where you can and break a few bottlenecks (such as some speed-limited bridges). At some point, the costs start soaring to knock a couple of minutes off of service to Boston or DC...at some point, it simply ceases to be a good investment and you're better off either slapping additional tracks down next to the existing line to simply buffer capacity, buying new cars, or moving onto other projects. We can go on all day and all night about where that line is, but I don't think anyone is going to claim it doesn't exist.
So, let's weigh two alternatives: The doorstopper that Amtrak issued last year tallies about $40-75bn in costs. *ahem*
$40-75 billion in costs for an alignment . The California project has a similar problem, cost-wise, but that's CA's baby. So, let's assume that we can do that project. Or let's look at projects with a broader base...say, 125-150 MPH service down to Atlanta. The average cost per mile for the Charlotte-Atlanta segment runs $4.9-7.8m/mile, depending on the speed and whether you're putting up wires and whatnot (per the SEHSR folks' study). Even going at the high end, at $8m/mile, the cost is 1/10th of the NE HSR project's low-end estimate ($87.7m/mile) and about 1/20th of the high-end estimate ($164m/mile).
For the same cost that we can get the NE project done, in other words, we could upgrade...oh, I dunno...maybe half of the country's rail lines? Even assuming that you couldn't keep the cost under $20m/mile, $75 billion will get you 3750 miles of train corridor. In that, I can probably put the Washington-Atlanta line (634 miles) and two entire Washington-Miami alignments (assuming 1200 miles apiece), and have about 700 miles to throw in somewhere else (maybe upstate NY? How about Philly-Pittsburgh? Or even both?). Considering that a fair share of your WAS-MIA alignments are going to coincide, you'll probably have even a little more wiggle room...this is really a no-brainer to me.
The other, cynical advantage of this is that if you bundle this together with some other things, you can probably short out a decent amount of opposition because of local job creation. Not all (we all know that some Tea Party elements will be implacable), but a decent share all the same.
Edit: Another bone to chew on: Even assuming that you only sped things up down to Raleigh, NC...if you could hold an average of 80 MPH until Raleigh and then ran on the same timetable we have now, you'd whack just over two hours off various trains' schedules. Now, I know that part of this is coming out of engine switches in Washington, DC...but I think this is emblematic of what is doable at least on paper. I think an 80 MPH average on the Silver Meteor gets you to Miami in a hair over 17 hours, an improvement of something like 10 hours on the current timetable. On the Crescent route, you're looking at about 10:45 rather than the current 17:58. Big improvements? Yes. Doable on a far saner budget than what gets thrown around for those 220 MPH trains? I'd be shocked as anything if this wasn't
far cheaper to set up and run than those other alignments.