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What If The United States Built A Transcontinental High Speed Rail Line?
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Mar 31, 2025
Americans have a tepid relationship with passenger rail, but this wasn't always the case! 100 years ago, it was quite common to take a train from one city to the next and one of the most pivotal moments in American history was when the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. Today, there are multiple high speed rail projects either being built out, planned, or conceptualized. But all are very regional and relatively small in scope. So what if the United States built a Transcontinental High Speed Rail Line?
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Transportation in the United States during the 1800s can really be summed up with a single event
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The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad connecting the East Coast to the West Coast
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The increased access provided by the new railroad was a huge catalyst for the growth we've seen in the American West today
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Not only in terms of population growth, but also infrastructure. So what if the United States built a transcontinental high-speed rail
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Hello and welcome to What If Geography, where we try and answer the great geographic what-if
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questions of the world. I'm your host, Jeff Gibson, and today we're going back to the wonderful world
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of high-speed rail. I don't think it's a big secret that I am personally a big fan of high-speed
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rail. Having worked on high-speed rail projects in the past and taking them around in other
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countries, I definitely see the benefits they have to society at large. Today we're going to
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talk about an idea that, in theory, could serve as a catalyst to a renaissance of passenger rail
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service in the United States. But before we get into today's episode, consider following me on
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Twitter and Instagram to find more of my geographic and transportation related content
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Links are in the description below. Rail in the United States has had a checkered history to say the least
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While rail has been integral to the build-out of infrastructure across the country, and even to this day rail serves as a very important part of the national infrastructure network
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it has certainly faded in priority when it comes to passenger transportation. But this wasn't always the case
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Prior to the invention of the personal vehicle, and perhaps more importantly the completion of the interstate highway system
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traveling by train from one city to the other was very common
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In the early to mid 1800s, the United States and associated rail companies built somewhere around 9 miles of rail almost entirely in the eastern half of the country This kind of rail infrastructure was revolutionary at the time giving relatively quick and easy access
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to cities and regions that, just a few years prior, might have taken days to get to. But there was one
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railroad that really kicked the rail revolution of the 1800s into overdrive, the Transcontinental
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Railroad. North America's first transcontinental passenger service was a 1,911-mile railroad that
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connected the Eastern U.S. Rail Network at Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific Coast at San Francisco
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So, contrary to its name, the railroad we think of transcontinental was really only semi-transcontinental
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But it did do the most important thing a single transcontinental railroad would do
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provide a direct connection from the east coast of the United States to the west coast
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Six years after the groundbreaking ceremony, the Western Railroad and the Eastern Railroad
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finally connected with each other. This occasion culminated in the famous last spike ceremony
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that saw the final spike driven in finalizing the connection. Once completed, a message was telegraphed to both the East and West that read simply
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done. Though it's worth pointing out that the railroad actually wouldn't be fully complete
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as in connected all the way to San Francisco, until a few years later
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On June 4th, 1876, an express train called the Transcontinental Express arrived in San Francisco via the Transcontinental Railroad
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only 83 hours and 39 minutes after it had departed New York City
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That seems like a long time today, but a few years prior, this very same journey would have taken months over land or weeks by ship
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Imagine for a moment the access this provided in relocating, visiting, or even seeing family that you assumed you would just never be able to see again
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This was revolutionary for the country and integral for the continued growth of western states and territories
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And grow they did. Between 1870 and 1930, San Francisco, the terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad
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experienced the biggest period of population growth in its history. In 1870, San Francisco was home to just about 140,000 people
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But by 1930, that number grew more than four times to 634,000 people
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Today, the Transcontinental Railroad is mostly defunct and not used. Amtrak's California Zephyr Line currently uses a small portion
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of the original Transcontinental Railroad line between San Francisco and Central Nevada
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but that's about it. but it really is solid proof at how a single piece of infrastructure can really change the
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narrative for what's possible. But before we get into what a transcontinental high-speed rail line
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would look like today, if you're enjoying this video, now would be a great time to subscribe
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More fun geography videos are just a single click away. Unlike with the transcontinental railroad of the 1800s, high-speed rail in the United States
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today doesn't have a spatial or logistical problem, but rather a perception problem
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Since the middle of the 1900s Americans have largely grown attached to two primary methods of transportation personal vehicles and passenger airplanes Yes people do still travel by rail but by and large
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it's a niche market. And certainly very few Americans have ever traveled by high-speed rail
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In fact, the closest any service gets within the United States to high-speed rail is Amtrak's
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current Acela line, which connects Washington DC to Boston by way of Philadelphia and New York City
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But while the Acela hits a maximum speed of about 150 miles per hour
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which while technically high-speed rail is on the low end, it really only hits that speed for about 33 miles of the total route
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So even for the relatively few Americans who have access to Acela, it's really not comparable to a true high-speed rail service
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such as the Shinkansen bullet train in Japan. For this reason, the same perception problem will continue to exist
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even after the Acela gets its planned speed upgrades, the Florida Brightline expands and gets faster
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and the California High Speed Rail and Texas High Speed Rail projects are open for business
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All four are too regional to create a cascading effect that would further promote
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not only the value of high speed rail, but also the value of regional rail
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Americans simply have too few examples and even fewer chances to experience high speed rail
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to be able to see the value in it. Enter the transcontinental high speed rail line
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A transcontinental high-speed rail line would be a massive infrastructure project for the United
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States, and it would not be cheap to undertake either. If we use current high-speed rail projects
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in the United States as an example, we can get a basic idea of how much a transcontinental high-speed
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rail line would cost. The California high-speed rail project is the only dedicated high-speed
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rail project in the United States that is currently being built out. When fully complete
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which includes both phase one and phase two of the project. The high-speed rail line will be approximately 800 miles in length
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and cost $93.5 billion. On a per mile cost, that comes out to about $117 million per mile
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That's incredibly expensive. But much of this cost is tied up in the cost of land
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in a state that has infamously expensive land. Still, high-speed rail is quite expensive
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The Pacific Northwest High-Speed Rail Study estimated that a high-speed rail line from Portland, Oregon
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to Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of Seattle, would cost somewhere between $24 and $42 billion. The Texas high-speed rail
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project connecting Houston to Dallas is estimated to cost somewhere around $16 billion, but with far
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fewer stations than either the California or Pacific Northwest high-speed rail lines
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No matter how you slice it, a transcontinental high-speed rail line would not be cheap regardless
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of the route it takes. Speaking of the route, in order to stay true to its transcontinental railroad
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our transcontinental high speed rail line will follow a similar path, albeit with some logical deviations
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to account for a different United States. So our transcontinental high speed rail line
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will start in New York City and end in San Francisco. From New York City it will connect to Philadelphia Pittsburgh Cleveland Toledo Chicago St Louis Kansas City Denver Salt Lake City Reno Sacramento and then San Francisco All told with stations located only
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in those metro areas, over 57 million people would be connected by high-speed rail. And just as
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important as the amount of people is the diversity of people across different American geographies
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This is perhaps the most important aspect of high-speed rail, providing ease of use and quick transportation between nearby cities along a single corridor
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This is why the interstate highway system works so well. Not because you can technically travel from San Francisco to New York City by car
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very few will ever actually do that, but rather along the entire corridor, people travel from one nearby city to the next
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A transcontinental high-speed rail line would have a similar effect. But there's one more aspect of a high-speed rail line
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that could radically change American perceptions of passenger rail service. If you've ever visited Europe and taken the train as your method of transportation
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you likely found it to be easy and relatively quick without a lot of waiting around
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like you would absolutely do in an airport. And you also likely did not board one of Europe's true high-speed rail lines
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Instead, you probably boarded a cheaper, more regional train that's also a bit slower, but still fairly effective
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You could also take one to basically anywhere in the continent, from small towns to larger cities
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This is the true power that a transcontinental high-speed rail line could bring to the United States
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The biggest issue around passenger rail in the United States right now is that the current Amtrak service has to compete with freight for rail right-of-way
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And it's not a fight that Amtrak often wins because the big freight companies such as Union Pacific and BNSF
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own the vast majority of track across the country. This causes not only delays for many current Amtrak routes
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but outright prevents additional routes from being implemented or an increase in service
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A transcontinental high-speed rail line, however, could help Americans embrace passenger rail service again and from there spread out
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Suddenly, connecting Pueblo, Colorado and Cheyenne, Wyoming to Denver via passenger rail
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makes a whole lot of sense. And the same can be said for every major city station and their respective regional city neighbors
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But without that first true nationwide high-speed rail example, it's a far tougher sell to Americans who simply have little to no experience riding the rails
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A transcontinental high-speed rail line would be transformational for the country. The United States as a country hasn't really completed a major nationwide infrastructure project
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since the interstate highway system. And given current issues around car and airplane transportation and climate change
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Maybe it's time for another mega project that thinks about things a little bit differently
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I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please subscribe to my channel
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See you next time
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