>>1499988The amount of progress varies depending on the part of the country you're in. Unsurprisingly America's three largest urban areas (the Northeast, Chicagoland, and California) all have some sort of formal rail transportation plan going on. It's outside of those areas where construction is difficult because people outside of existing Amtrak towns don't think rail can work period, so construction is far more piecemeal.
The Southeast Corridor (officially designated in 2003, irrc) is the perfect example of this, since it only exists within documents but the coordination between all the different states is clear and allows the idea to be a going concern. First it was with NCDOT's Piedmont improvement program, now it's VA's turn with their attempts to build a dedicated passenger line between DC and Richmond. The spot between Richmond and Raleigh can then be built, and a core system operated. Ridership from that would justify further expansion into SC and Georgia.
California is similar but there's a formal drive for the project there so everything indexes forward every two years when money is cut. It's how we got the Bakersfield-Fresno and SF-SJ sections cleared, with current arguments on when (not how) exactly those two connect.
>like why doesnt dontrel trmbpo just say hey capital cities, heres 1000 billion, go build a fancy station and i'll draw a line between them all.Because then you wind up with two stations without trains. This is exactly what happened in California where both SF and Anahiem built big stations (the new Transbay Terminal and "ARCTIC") twenty years before the system opens, because building the track, tunnels and bridges is the hardest part. It's why whenever CA's HSR Authority has to consider stations, they go for the cheapest option which is using existing facilities whenever plausible (exception is LA's Union Station, which requires expansion in the form of run-through tracks. A new passenger concourse was eliminated to finance this).
