High Speed Rail: "Texas Central Railway intends to build a Houston-Dallas line with private money."

Of course the builders were able to pick and choose where they wanted to run their first line, unlike California which was forced by God to run their choo-choo from Bordon to Corcoran, a 65-mile stretch that will cost a minimum of double the $4.15 Billion estimate.
Borden to Corcoran?*
Okay, God had nothing to do with that routing of the West Coast disaster, that was all California High Speed Rail Authority.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for high-speed rail, it's just that in the U.S., in every single instance the promoters have been lying scum.
Every single time.

From CityLab:

The Big Texas Plan to Copy Japan's High-Speed Rail Success

Texas Central Railway envisions a Dallas-Houston high-speed rail line modeled off the JR Central's Shinkansen. (Courtesy JR Central)

With more than 300 daily departures, the Shinkansen bullet train covers the 300 miles between Tokyo and Osaka, Japan's two largest metro areas, in as little as 2 hours and 25 minutes. To an American tourist, the journey can feel futuristic. But the world’s first high-speed line, which now carries nearly 400,000 people a day, actually began running half a century ago.

It's a galling fact to consider upon returning home, where the fastest American train is Amtrak's comparatively pokey Acela Express, plodding 400 miles from Washington to Boston in about 7 hours. While bullet trains now race across Europe and Asia, American high-speed rail has a long history of delay and disappointment. President Obama's plan for a national network stalled when Republican governors refused to accept federal money. A $68 billion project is underway in California, but that line, which voters approved six years ago, isn't slated to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco until at least 2029.

Richard Lawless, who as a C.I.A. officer posted in Tokyo in the 1980s was a frequent Shinkansen passenger, has long found America's failure to embrace high-speed rail "mind-boggling." But today the former Bush administration official is in a position to change things, as chairman and CEO of Texas Central Railway, a private company that plans to link Dallas and Houston with a 200-mile-per-hour bullet train as soon as 2021. The venture just might be high-speed rail's best hope in the United States.

"The project has been progressing below the radar, very quietly, very deliberately, over the last four years plus," says Lawless. It's now undergoing an environmental impact study that will take between two and three years, but Texas Central, whose backers include Japan's JR Central railway, has already conducted its own extensive research. The company, originally called U.S.-Japan High-Speed Rail, looked at 97 possible routes nationwide before concluding that Texas was the ideal place for a high-speed line — and that healthy profits could be made in long-distance passenger rail, a travel mode that for the past 40 years has existed only with the help of massive government subsidies....MORE

On Friday the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Amtrack was bailing on the California plan:
California, Amtrak end joint high-speed train bid

Previously on the California Dreaming channel:
Mother Jones: "California High Speed Rail Now Even More Ridiculous Than Before"
Don't Argue Choo-choos With Reason: PolitiFact Gets High-Speed Rail Facts in Florida Wrong 
California High-speed Rail Costs Triple to $100 Billion (and it will be arriving late) 
California High Speed Rail: The Man Who Predicted The Cost and the Delay 
Jerry Brown Rejects $100 Billion Cost Estimate, Says Cap-and-trade Fees Will Fund High-speed Rail

And elsewhere:
China Considering Beijing-US High Speed Rail Line

*From the San Jose Mercury News 20Dec2010: