China must be chugging Tylenol

Based on the latest Silent Hill, a lot.

These poor people have such a bad rail network that even their dreams are limited...

The thing is the rail network was pretty comprehensive at one point. Only a few remain.

it takes me 24 hours to go by train the same distance it takes me to fly 1.5 hours. and the cost is the same. there are some problems.

Thank you. I was kind of offended with the other one for implying I would neglect a huge region.

Its the other way around, there needs to be as many ways to get out of Florida as possible.

A bunch of individual reasons.

Chock Full-0-Sea ports

Nasa historically moved a lot of big stuff over rail.

Florida has a shit ton of Agriculture but a lack of raw materials

Tourism

It's flat as hell

The train tracks are extra support to keep Florida from floating away.

Lots of people in a pretty small area in relatively dense cities that currently drive or fly between the cities (technically called strong city pairings). There's also a pretty enormous tourism industry in Florida that captures much of the Midwestern US/anyone not going to California or Hawaii for their beach or disney vacation. Florida is also flat which makes for very cheap high speed rail. Note how the map goes out of its way to avoid the mountains out West.

That being said, I'm not sure this map is one of the ones made with serious city pairing calculations. I'm skeptical that Quincy, IL has a really strong draw for high speed rail, for example, and that long gap between Portland and Sacramento/San Francisco, while beautiful and filled with cool places, is way too sparsely populated to justify 6hrs on high speed rail. I think it's a sort of meme map that's been going around for years, though I wish it were real.

It's kind of weird too because logistically the northern border is the easiest place to expand rails: big flat great planes region, with both of the two largest rivers for ferrying in supplies, followed by a bypass around the bulk of the rocky mountains into Oregon or Washington State.

Yeah this is clearly the work of Big Acetylsalicylic Acid

for freight, not passenger rail, which is what high-speed rail is primarily designed for

As would I. There is an existing line from Kansas City to Tulsa to OKC that has been talked about being opened for passengers for a couple decades.

You need to hit major centres and you need to consider common trips to be efficient. You’re talking about the most efficient per station but most efficient per passenger is going to look different. This image doesn’t see too bad and can still have branching lines.

Umm yeah...now we are autisming! Though I'm not autistic as a disclaimer.

Trains are a common special interest of people with autism.

It's something that happened in the meme-o-sphere and I too am left out