C'mon, this is outrageous. The crossover between (current and planned) fast trains and flying is more like *300* miles.
[WS:] Jordan, you are fighting against a straw man. Nobody is saying that a train can go as fast as a plane. The argument is that when you factor in population distribution and economics you will find that a great deal of people travel distances 200-300 miles between major urban centers, and in that situation trains are far more efficient and faster than planes. A TGV traveling at it stop speed can get from DC to NYC in about an hour, a few minutes more if it stops in Baltimore, Philly, and Newark - and it highly unlikely that an ordinary citizen can fly from downtown DC to downtown Manhattan in less than three hours.
The reason why we heave no high velocity trains in the US (Acela is only a poor cousin of TGV) in purely political and has everything to do with the power of the lobbyists for airlines and auto industry and little to do with technology or geography. It is precisely the same reason why the US mobile telephony sucks in comparison to the rest of the world.
Wojtek