 and the iron horse, the earth shaker, the fire breather, which tramples down the hills, which outruns the laggard winds, which leaps over the rivers, which grinds the rocks to powder and breaks down the gates of the mountain. He too shall build an empire and an epic Putnam's magazine, 1853. In the 19th century, trains moved America. The locomotive symbolized modernity and man's domination of nature. It connected the east and west coasts and helped settle the frontier. And by 1916, rail accounted for 98 percent of inner-city travel. And then everything changed. Air travel and the personal automobile offering travelers the convenience of point-to-point mobility led to the decline of passenger rail use. But trains were still useful for hauling free. The remaining passenger rail companies were going bankrupt. So in 1970, Richard Nixon signed a bill that led to the creation of Amtrak, a new publicly owned, privately run company that was supposed to operate at a profit. 14 years after Amtrak was created, the Reagan administration wanted to eliminate federal subsidies. Amtrak was created, as I understand it, as a two-year test to see if we could have a for-profit corporation. And I'd say that the record of Amtrak and $11 billion later, we're looking now at $8 billion for the next decade. Congressional Democrats prevailed, and the federal government continued providing subsidies. The cost is getting substantially better, and there's a consensus across the country, even in the administration, that the federal assistance to Amtrak has been going down. There's more that's coming out of the fare box. Federal subsidies were falling in the 1980s, but then climbed right back up in the 1990s. Yet by the time Amtrak Joe was elected president, the system was in financial trouble. So Biden passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill with $66 billion earmarked for rail. Yet train enthusiasts want Washington to send billions more, often sharing fantasy maps of a U.S. high-speed network that would rival Europe's. But do we give up too quickly on private passenger rail? Can it still be commercially viable without massive subsidies? In the Sunshine State, one company is betting that it can, under very specific conditions. People have been talking about introducing passenger trains in Florida for a long time, probably 20 years or more. Mike Reiniger is the CEO of Brightline Trains. The company is starting service between Miami and Orlando, a trip that will take under three hours each way, compared to riding Amtrak, which takes five hours and 40 minutes in one direction, and seven hours and 48 minutes in the other. This is the first privately funded intercity passenger rail system in this country in more than a century. Ben DePort is a senior vice president at Brightline. It's totally different than anything that you're familiar with, whether it's with train travel or public bus travel. Unlike Amtrak service, Brightline's Florida train won't receive government subsidies, and Reiniger is betting that he can turn a profit. Passenger rail, he says, makes commercial sense under specific conditions, such as in this case by connecting two popular cities that are about 250 miles apart. Because 250 to 350 miles is too far to drive and too short to fly. And when you introduce a train into distances that length, you can approximate the time of flying, significantly improve the time of driving, and you can offer it at a price point that makes it an economic proposition. The passengers we spoke to in the Miami station who traveled from Boca Raton said that the hour and 15 minute ride beats getting stuck in traffic. It's just more convenient versus driving. I mean traffic in Florida has become so bad, trains faster, it's comfortable, you're passive, you can read emails, read a book, listen to podcasts, it's much, much easier. The Miami station is modern and sleek, and the train is clean, quiet, and smooth with flexible seating arrangements. Brightline is also the southeast fastest train, reaching speeds of 125 miles an hour between Miami and Orlando. Though significantly slower than high speed rail in many parts of the world, it beats the region's Amtrak, which tops out at 80 miles an hour in Florida. So when Brightline came to be, we modernized the existing track, we double tracked it in certain areas, we improved 156 grade crossings, improved or enhanced 56 bridges. Brightline saved money by upgrading existing infrastructure and paying for permission to build new tracks adjacent to existing highways and traffic corridors. The company also invested in real estate along the route, anticipating that the existence of its service will boost property values. They took a clue from the Hong Kong mass transit railway, which from its start developed as a combination of real estate and transportation. You know, the train feeds the real estate, the real estate helps the train. Robert Poole is the director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason TV and Reason Magazine. They're buying some adjacent land that was low use and adding real estate there too. So it's a very, it's a different business model. Amtrak has never done anything like that. So why can't the US have a network of high speed trains similar to the ones crisscrossing Europe? For one thing, European rail depends heavily on taxpayer subsidies. In the whole world, we only know of two high speed rail lines that claim to have covered their full cost, the cost of building it and the ongoing cost from the fare box revenues. That's the first TGV line in France from Paris to the island and the first one in Japan, the Tokaido line from Tokyo to Osaka. The bottom line thing is massive subsidies, both subsidies to build it and subsidies to operate. The US hasn't developed high speed rail in part because of its geography. The most populous US cities are far more spread out than those in Europe and China, so it's easier to fly. For shorter distances, cars and buses are more flexible and much cheaper to operate. What America has is tremendous road infrastructure, tremendous freight rail infrastructure. In the 50s, large scale financial commitments were made to developing both of those systems. And on the back of a brand new interstate highway system and fantastic American made cars and cheap gas, America became a place where we moved freight by train and people by cars. There has been one ambitious effort to build high speed rail in the US, in California, but that project turned into something so foolish that it's almost a crime. According to Quinton L. Cobb, the former state senator who is crucial in rallying support for a $10 billion bond measure to build high speed rail in the state. He became a fierce opponent of the project when it ran out of money and the agency in charge, he says, broke its promises to voters. The 520-mile railway, which has received more than $20 billion in state and federal subsidies, but after 15 years of construction, they've only laid track for a 170-mile stretch in the Central Valley. Brian Kelly, who took over as the CEO of the California High Speed Rail Authority in 2018, says that the project was initially mismanaged. They got into construction out of sequence and they got into construction before the authority was ready. As a result of that, if you're trying to get into construction, you've got to contract or mobilize to build, but you're behind on right-of-way, you haven't moved all the utilities, then you're going to run into delays and costs. The cost of the project has ballooned from $33 billion to about $128 billion. Can you give us some reasons for why that number nearly quadrupled since the beginning of the project? I mean, one is a $33 billion cost estimate in 2008, which was 15 years ago, was before any work was done. None of the environmental work was done, none of the design work was done. It was an estimate based on paper. According to the New York Times, as of last year, although the rail authority was spending $1.8 million daily, the project wasn't even on track to be done by the end of the century. Kelly suggests that wasn't enough. To get construction going, we need to spend about between $80 million and $100 million a month, you know, more than $3 million a day, but that's the pace we need to be on to get done on schedule. As Governor Brown used to say, you enjoy martini on the train and you get there in about three hours. It's a much better way to move. So do Californians want to do that? My answer is yes. I hope their answer is yes. The project climbed in price, in part, because its planners decided not to use existing traffic corridors or rails, opting for a longer route with many more stops. Politicalization that led to this really flawed plan that's costing way, way more than if they'd followed I-5 and didn't have to do as much massive tunneling, and the real estate acquisition, endless litigation, having to divide hundreds and hundreds of farms in half and fight with them over condemning their land, that has delayed things dramatically. Brightline is also building in California, developing its own 218-mile rail line running from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamanga, which is on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The company is betting that travelers will opt to leave their cars at home and avoid airport hassle. We acquired property in Victor Valley, we acquired property in Las Vegas, we have rights of way from the California and Nevada Departments of Transportation, so we were able to do it without eminent domain. Reiniger says California's high-speed rail project has to clear far more regulatory hurdles than Brightline. They have different environmental regulations that they're subject to, and their system profile is just very different than the entrepreneurial private sector approach. But unlike its Florida line, Brightline West is not going to be a test of whether rail can be commercially viable because the company is banking on about $3 billion in federal subsidies through Joe Biden's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Pool is skeptical. It becomes far less of a business venture and much more of a, we can do grand things because we don't have to worry about what it costs. And that's a gross oversimplification, but there's a different kind of mentality. Made in America by Americans, union labor, true high-speed, 200 miles an hour, fully electric, renewable use of power. You check the box on every benefit that you can possibly bring to bear. Following on its success in Florida, Reiniger says Brightline is looking for commercially viable rail corridors all over the country. We're looking all around the country at 250 to 300 mile separated cities. Portland, Seattle is one that looks attractive to us. Texas has a number of them, Dallas, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, San Antonio, Houston. In the 21st century, autonomous vehicles are more likely to swallow the ground with fierceness and rage and to be capable of building an empire and an epic. But Brightline does represent a true test of whether there are narrow cases in which travelers actually still value passenger rail enough to pay for it with their own money.