Yeah, I recall talking to an urban planner (turned performance artist) a few years back, who was of the opinion that high-speed rail would go the way of the zeppelin, ’cause of those high energy costs. It wasn’t an idle analogy…he was explaining that zeppelin travel was also very fast and popular for its day, but the “hidden cost” in its case turned out to be the expense of storing the giant things when they weren’t in use. (He did wonder, though, if you could use the kind of automated logistics they use in trucking nowadays to keep the things from crowding up your hangar…but I guess that’s another story.)

He agreed that the American high-speed rail experiments were a carefully-encouraged distraction to keep the national rail network from returning to working order….