I used to travel Amtrak in your beloved California. It was slow (6.5hr vs 3.5hr), but I always liked to be able to sit at a table, watch the scenery, and work on shit while getting blasted.

There were times I had an entire car to myself... yet even though the train is not that popular, politics demands that it continue, and forbids the changes that are necessary to make it desirable. It shows how Amtrak is caught in a bad situation and has to pay zillions of dollars for a service few people like or use....

The worst thing is that all that wasted money is unavailable for any actually useful ideas in the future.

Similarly, the California High Speed Rail, for which CA got all those sweet federal bucks, is a fraudulent boondoggle of catastrophic proportions. Yet bureaucrats would look bad if they admitted reality, and they'd be in big trouble and have to pay back those federal bucks... so they make sure the idiotic project continues. It's the definition of throwing good money after bad, and it's exactly because CA said "we have to start with something...