I'm all for "wasting" money on nice things. We waste plenty of money on some very not nice things, some of which involve killing a lot of people. If we can lose billions of dollars in Iraq, we can "lose" billions of dollars making a nice supertrain.
While I'm no railroad engineering expert, I do think there's too much focus on the top speed of trains. It's really the average speed that matters. That's the problem with Acela - there are too many places where it can't go anywhere near top speed, and in fact can really just creep along. 220 mph trains are neato, but if we can get average speeds up to 100 mph on the whole NE corridor that'd be pretty awesome.
