Bazz we are more likely to return stagecoach transport than the greens ever winning government
The bush would be better served by trains than current very high freight prices road transport must change because of fuel and distance

speeds at which there's any danger of the train coming off the track.
Sylvia Eise,
No such risk in Monorail ! No livestock, no nothing apart from the odd idiot trying to sabotage things. Less cost all up in the mid-long run.

In Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged 1957 she talks a lot about trains- including the view of the public and that of business- passenger transport verses cargo. In Liberal Democracy people expect "the government" to solve the problems- the question is "who is the government"- the government is the people- in many cases the government is an excuse to avoid responsibility -if the people want cheap fast trains to take them to work they need to create the system- those that want trains need to tell the rest of us why and how.

One of the issues of infrastructure such as trains is it is constantly being outgrown by the population- it suffers from a "Malthusian like problem". Before the people that build a pay for the infrastructure get the benefit of it the capacity is utilized- this is one of the basic problems with Liberalism.

Few countries have fast trains over large distances probably because it's hard to make the finances work. The problem with fast trains is they need to stop to pick up passengers or cargo along the route- they also need more sidings. In effect planes (or cars) holding less people often end up being more practical. It's a similar problem to "the last mile problem of telecommunications".

The community in general need perhaps to have a greater understanding of engineering in order to have a better input into the practicalities of community utilities

There was some discussions about a VFT or Transrapid project in the 80's. I was lucky to talk with some of the engineers.

It's not only the curves on Google Earth that are important but the changes in elevation. From memory costs for tunneling used to be $1M per kilometre- I believe it's much higher now. The Channel Tunnel 40kms cost $6B from memory (initially costed at 2.7B). Any major city would have much more than 40 kms of track grading for a 300 km per hour train. But a train that stopped less would be more viable and would produce noticeable improvements - but still perhaps impractical.

To me the problem comes down to- "too many people".

Elon Musk has an interesting concept for urban transport in his tunnel projects- he appears to have also researched Tunnel Boring Machines to reduce tunneling costs by an order of magnitude (x10).

But even he doesn't go with trains.

Canem,
You seem to have far less understanding of civil engineering than you think you do. Many of your apparent problems are really non issues.
Not every train has to stop at every station.
The more people there are, the more economically viable high speed rail is. The initial problem is not too many people, but too few. Indeed high speed trains can be made with such high capacity that they'll be running profitably for decades before more line capacity is needed - and when more is needed, it can be added in a way that improves connectivity as well as capacity.

Rand didn't understand macroeconomics. If she had, she'd have known that government borrowing to fund infrastructure is not a problem.

High speed trains are generally less gradient sensitive than conventional trains. The main reason tunnelling costs went up is that the specified requirements went up. But tunnelling technology is improving rapidly, and Musk's company is far from the only one working to get the costs down.