Review the story of R. S. McNamara and the US effort to build an SST (supersonic transport). He examined the situation, found the return on the investment isn't there, and killed the program. The result was a lot of caterwauling which isn't all that much different that what you see from the pro-HSR folks here. The Europeans went ahead (the Anglo-French Concorde), and the result was the demise of the European airplane manufacturing industry, which has gone through numerous shuffles of varying combinations of private-government-private-government onwerships ever since. Knowlegeable types in the US air industry now agree that McNamara saved the US airplane manufacturing business from bankruptcy. Also keep in mind that it wasn't Regan's "Star Wars" stuff that did the USSR in, it was the USSR's trying to keep up with countering it which bankrupted the government.

You can place France, Germany, and the Low Countries inside Texas. Does Texas have that sort of population density?