Why invest in rail in particular, as opposed to other modal infrastructure?
If you want to really talk about a stimulus package for the economy, investing in rail is wonderful. There are local jobs and local materials. It’s good for steel plants, we can train people. There’s a heck of a lot of technology in the rail world, more so than a lot of people realize. From a stimulus point of view, from a jobs point of view, it’s fabulous. With high energy prices, we’re also going to see pretty dramatic realignments in real-estate value and even faster resurgence of city centers, which helps the housing market, too. Which U.S. routes could see the most immediate improvement. If you look at Chicago to Detroit … it’s a complex railroad, but for less than a billion dollars, you could make that a high-speed passenger corridor. Some of the lines around Chicago are practically ready to go to support 110-miles-per-our travel. We’d like to look south of Washington, heading toward Richmond. In Florida, many of the routes are the right distance for a lot of improvement. High
