All aboard? Not so fast

0 Comments | USA TODAY, August, 2008 | by Larry Copeland

For decades, many American advocates of high-speed train travel have looked longingly at nations such as Japan, France and Germany, dreaming of a day when travelers in the USA would zip from city to city faster than they could drive and nearly as fast as they could fly.

Those dreams were always dashed by financial realities and political impediments.

That was before $4-a-gallon gasoline, ever-worsening highway traffic jams and financially strapped airlines cutting the number of flights. Advocates of high-speed rail say the nation is primed like never before to accept a kind of transportation that has never quite caught on in the land of the automobile.

"That's one of the things that is a prime motivation right now in getting support in Congress,"...