Here’s a neat project, but unfortunately we have to wait until 2020 for service to be available.  This will start with Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 2 hours 40 minutes.  They are talking about very frequent trains (every 5 minutes during peak times), and they ought to be useful for shorter hops too.  Barbara Boxer sent around an email about how she’s working on getting California additional federal funding as other states apparently aren’t ready to start such a project.