What follows is an excerpt from a 1957 book, "Trolley Car Treasury", by Frank Rowsome, describing an interurban railroad scheme that has parallels to what we see going on with California "high-speed rail".
I'll guess that the book is now out of copyright and posting this doesn't violate any restrictions. The entire book is enjoyable, even if you're not a "rail fan":
======================================================
"The ambition and vitality of the interurban reached a kind of pinnacle in the Chicago-New York Air Line Railroad, a magnificent dream that flickered on and off from 1906 to about 1913. This was to have been a breathtaking piece of engineering and construction — a high-speed double track that was to stretch a direct 750 miles between the two cities, a distance hundreds of miles shorter than steam trunk lines required. It was to plunge through the Pennsylvania mountains in a series of dramatic tunnels and fills. There was to be no curve that couldn't be taken at 90 m.p.h., nor any grade greater than one-half of one per cent.
Streamlined electric locomotives were to whisk luxurious cars between the cities in ten hours, indolently averaging 75 m.p.h. When in 1906 ground was first broken for construction of the road, thousands of Air Line stockholders felt that the world's most ambitious interurban would soon become the world's most profitable one too.
There were aspects of a crusade, or perhaps of a cult, about the Air Line. Each month stockholders received an exciting periodical, The Air Line News. It reported how wonderfully matters were progressing on the building of Your Railroad ("A huge Vulcan steam shovel is already on the job"). It printed pictures of steel girders that had already arrived for bridges; it ran enthusiastic letters from stockholders who had visited the site; and it carried coupons in each issue by which readers or their friends could apply for more stock, purchasable in installments.
In four or five sections of the country, Air Line stockholders formed into local clubs so they could get to know each other and could listen to speeches about their wonderful railroad. The land-acquisition program in Indiana, where construction took place, was also marked by an evangelical fervor. When Colonel Hord, the mellifluous and confidence-inspiring option man, approached even the most flinty-eyed farmer astride the right-of-way, the Colonel was quite likely to emerge with his option in his pocket, swapped for a few shares of stock, and sometimes with the farmer's savings as well, traded for a few extra shares.
The Air Line was not merely a hot-air promotion. Alexander C. Miller, the guiding spirit, J. D. Price, the president of the construction company, and their associates were substantial citizens with a back- ground in railroading. Miller seems to have been a dedicated believer in the Air Line dream. If the company used high-pressure promotion methods, it was because conventional financing wouldn't serve for so grandiose a plan, and because banks were already heavily involved in competing interurbans. There seems to have been no hint of corporate sharp practices.
Nevertheless, a dismal sequence of troubles tarnished the shining dream. Enough stock was sold, on installments, to pay for the first 100-mile division east from Chicago. It was anticipated that as soon as this division began to make money, new investors would flock in to provide capital to build the other divisions. But a sharp business depression in 1907 and 1908 cut off the sale of stock, and brought widespread defaulting on installment payments for that already sold.
By the time money began to run out. some miles of main line had been constructed westward from a point outside La Porte, Indiana. The Air Line found itself in possession of some magnificent track that led, in terms of revenue traffic, from Nowhere to West Nowhere. Belatedly the company bent its efforts to build connecting links to nearby towns. It built an amusement park outside La Porte that generated some travel, and it fought fierce battles to obtain feeder franchises in Gary and elsewhere.
But the worst headache for the Air Line by far was the impractically high construction specifications. To keep within the maximum-grade limitation, each overpass that bridged a steam railroad had to be flanked by enormous ramps that started almost a mile on each side of the intersection. The Air Line actually built a number of these titanic embankments. Elsewhere across the gently rolling northern Indiana terrain, even minor undulations of the landscape created enormous difficulties. The worst trouble came at a place called Coffee Creek, about a dozen miles from Gary. Here adherence to the specifications involved both a deep cut and a huge fill, 180 feet wide at the bottom, that marched for 2 miles across a valley. The power shovels and dump cars worked month after month at this grand undertaking, steadily pouring the stockholders' cash into a mound of earth of flabbergasting proportions.
Even though this crossing was ultimately completed, Coffee Creek helped kill the Air Line. By 1913 a kind of misshapen and unpromising interurban system was patched together between La Porte, Valparaiso, Gary, and Chicago. Less than 30 miles of it was dead-straight track built to Air Line standards, and the rest was ordinary, winding track. Among the cars operated by the company (which by then had no hope beyond that of surviving as a regional line) were two handsome Niles cars with New York lettered in gold on the eastern end and Chicago at the other. These two, and the stretches of arrow-straight track reaching toward the horizon, were what remained of the dream."
