Re:Trains are obsolete (Score 1)

trains have been around for 200 years, and the cross-country tracks that they built for them still exist

That's true, but the experience in Europe is that you cannot share track between high speed and conventional trains. Greatly differing speeds is a safety problem, and also the fast trains need nearly straight track, something which can typically only be achieved in mountainous regions with newly constructed rail lines, which is of course very expensive.

planes are still more popular and don't take up real estate on the ground...

The real estate argument may be more negative for planes than trains; land is cheap outside of cities, and the space required for centrally located train stations has generally already been allocated in previous eras when trains were more popular. Meanwhile, ever larger airports are being built ever further away from the cities they ostensibly serve (e.g., the new Denver airport is nearly an hour away from the city), because it is just too expensive to steamroll the entire cities worth of space needed for the runways and for the increasingly large buffer areas demanded by residents who don't want to be disturbed by jets flying just overhead.

Expanding airports is very expensive, and in any case they are too far from their cities. My thinking is that there is no cheap solution to the intercity transportation problem, so I would favor fast trains because although they cost plenty also, they are more convenient to get to, better ecologically, and more scalable.