Quote Originally Posted by Brown, Jon Brow View Post
With journey times of half a day of course people are going to fly instead.

But the point I'm making is that why in the worlds wealthiest nation are the railways so far behind Europe, China and Japan. Journeys of that distance should only take 2-3 hours by train, which is quicker than flying when you take into account airport check-in.

Some rail routes in America are slower now than they were in the 1920s!
Follow the money.

http://www.deutschebahn.com/file/en/...14_dbgroup.pdf
From the figures:
Revenues comparable: €19,842bn H1 2014

Logically, the whole year should be about €39,684bn a year.

If you use a multiple of 7 on Revenues (which is usually excessive and overly idiotic), then Deutsche Bahn would probably capitalise at €277,788bn
The US interstate system cost probably €438,000bn to build.

The US chose to spend it's infrastructure bills for 50 years on road rather than rail. I seriously doubt whether Amtrak which runs over existing commercial railway lines, has anywhere even near one tenth the ability to raise that sort of capital required to build a DB equivalent system; as such, there'll never be an ICE in the US.