I live near Seattle, and I love it here. We're a little isolated from the rest of the country, which is both good and bad. One of the bad things is that it takes frustratingly long to get to any other part of the country. If you want to get there in less than a day, you need to go by air. It takes 24 hours to get to the nearest other region, the San Francisco Bay Area, by rail, or 13 hours by road, but only if you're lucky with traffic and break the speed limit a lot.
Lots of people advocate for High Speed Rail, and I am very much one of them. An imaginary 200 MPH (300KPH) HSR system could get us from Seattle to San Francisco in 3.5 hours. If the stations are near to your destinations, it would be practical to get to a meeting and back in a work day. This isn't really practical by air unless you fly private--Airports are half an hour or more outside of town, and TSA adds 90 minutes or more. Add that to 2 hours in the air each way and it adds up to 4.5-5 hours travel time each way. Add that to the meeting itself and it's a 12 hour day or more. Private Jets are slower, but not that much, and they subtract all of TSA, and they can be precisely scheduled--it makes the one day round trip possible, which it just isn't on scheduled flights. So the people who can afford it, do so.
The Northwest has three big cities: Vancouver, Seattle and Portland. Metro Vancouver has about 3.4M, Seattle, 4.2M and Portland 2.5M. But those three cities are in a geographic island: There's a huge mountain range between central Oregon and the Central Valley of California, and two even bigger mountain ranges to the east. It's over 600 miles from Portland to San Francisco, and about 300 of them are really rugged terrain. The SF Bay area has only about 8 million people: less than the PNW. To make a High Speed Rail Corridor really practical, LA/San Diego, about 20 million people need to be added. And once you've done that, you need to connect to the rest of the country. Spokane, Boise, Helena and the other northwest cities are tiny. You need to go down to Salt Lake City and Denver, or up to Calgary/Edmonton, to reach many folks.
There is already rail through all of these routes, but a lot of it is very far from being able to handle High Speeds. Through the Siskiyous, it's barely able to handle moderate speeds and there are some radical twists and turns. Making this capable of even 200KPH, will be incredibly expensive, much less 300. A bunch of the existing route is comfortably able to do 80MPH--but less than half. All the terrain north of Eugene will need to be moved into the Willamette/Cowlitz/Nooksak Corridor, and rebuilt to HSR standards. The construction cost to do this is at least $100M/mile for the 700 miles from Eugene to Vancouver--$700B, and that doesn't factor in the cost to obtain the land and get other political clearances. Figure $2T. Redding to San Diego is about the same: 700 miles/$2T. Finally, you've got to do the mountains: Eugene to Redding is about 300 very mountainous miles. That'll probably cost at least $2T, maybe even more.
Would it be worth it? Perhaps. The roadbed that's already in the various flat corridors will be cheaper to obtain than the portion that's not. Near Seattle runs along the Puget Sound Coastline, and will be useless for our purposes--Everett to Olympia, well over 100 miles, and apart from the cities themselves, that's probably the most expensive land on the route. Such a system will stimulate business enormously--but $6T is a lot of money: about 2 years GDP from the entire affected region.
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In the long term--surely not in my lifetime, we will have some form of VacTrain. Hyperloop or maybe something even better. Many pundits argue that this will be quite a bit cheaper than HSR, and I see their point: Hyperloop takes a tiny amount of space, and tunnels and bridges are much less substantial than for trains. A Tunnel Boring Machine through the Sikiyous would solve a mess of problems. Not sure it's possible, but it's an appealing thought. Not just 200MPH. 1000 MPH. Seattle to SF in 45 minutes, no waiting anywhere.
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