Warning: freedom units, because I'm from the US talking about a US issue and I'm too lazy to make the conversions ATM.

Okay, I'm all for dunking on private companies, but Brightline is actually not awful. They're also not high speed rail, which is why they're able to have such relative success with their budgets and timetables. FRA rules for their speed category (I think category 5 or 6? Can someone check me on that?) are A LOT less severe than they are for true HSR speeds (190 mph+ as I understand it). That makes the alignments cheaper and easier to build on. Brightline also handles some of the funding for the rail line by doing an old but tried-and-true method of developing real estate around the stations and sort of acting as a real estate company that dabbles in trains. They also saved money and time when they didn't grade seperate, which is why you're going to see a lot of Brightline trains flexing on and pixelating drivers in FL. Okay, a got a little off track there, but the point is that Brightline isn't bad. A lot of urbanist YouTube wants to hate Brightline, but can't seem to bring themselves to do so; whether that's an argument for Brightline or against the state of transit in the US is another matter.

In fact, I'd argue that Brightline's model of building highER speed rail (~150mph) is actually really sensible for longer distance trains than would normally be covered by HSR. HSR is goddamn expensive to build in the US, you need a lot of ridership (which usually means making sure that you're aligned with a series of metros instead of just point A to point B), and conventional wisdom is that it can't really compete with airlines past about 450 miles.

Take, for example, LA to Seattle. Google Maps has that at 1134 miles. Currently, the trip by car is 18 hours (avg 62 mph), which is a hard drive, but doable in a day with an iron ass and some ultra shitty gas station coffee. That same trip by Amtrak (coast starlight) is 34-36 hours (avg 33 mph for the 34 hour case). For our viewers at home, that's half the speed and, therefore, twice as long. That, to me, is inexcusable. There's no situation in which mid-or-long-distance train travel should be matched or beaten by car travel, and that's how it is all over Amtrak's network. Basically, the only argument Amtrak has is comfort, and that's not nothing, but Amtrak isn't exactly the pinnacle of luxury on rails. Every European exchange student I've had who's ridden the San Joaquins thought it was "okay", as in middling. I could live with that if it was fast or frequent, but it's neither.

Now, what if we raise Amtrak Coast Starlight's average speed to just 120 mph (which is less than Brightline, I should add)? Well, 1134 mi / 120 mph, the miles cancel, leaving us with 9.45 hours. That's a comfortable overnight trip. I can't find 36 hours to take a train to Seattle, much less 72 round trip, but I could definitely find 10 and 20, respectively. If we raise the average speed to Brightline's ~150 (less realistic because of the very long distance, imo) we can pull it off in less than eight hours. The California Zephyr, running from San Francisco, CA to Chicago, IL (2,132 mi by driving) goes from 51 hours by train (avg 41 mph) vs 31 hrs by car (which still comes out faster even if you add 12 hours for rest at a final avg 49 mph) to just 17 hours at 120mph or 14 hours at 150. And yes, I'm aware that Amtrak does not own almost any of their own alignment. In this hypothetical, they would and it's a choice between HSR and Mid-Speed Rail; in either case, the most drastic improvements will always come from Amtrak having their own alignment so they can't get jerked around by the vulture capital freight companies.

These Mid-Speed Rail lines are cheaper and easier to build, equip, and maintain and could still offer a viable (and possibly cheaper) alternative to flying or driving while being a lot more realistic than expecting people to set aside two or three whole ass days of sitting in a coach seat with pretty middling accomodations. All in all, don't take this as a defense of Brightline as much as a defense of Mid-Speeed Rail. I think it's a perfectly reasonable solution for LA to Vegas transit, and I'd much rather see more of it than not. That is, I'd much rather see Mid-Speed Rail networks blanket the US than opposing them so we can continue to fantasize about a nation-wide High Speed Rail network that will probably materialize some time after we figure out fusion power (read: "in twenty to thirty years"). I think it makes a lot more sense to do HSR where it's super obvious to be beneficial (like California, the Gulf Coast, or the proposed Chicago hub network) and just stick with Mid-Speed for everywhere else and longer-distance tracks.