Just got out of Hospital after a nearly 3 week stay, with one full week of a cable TV outage that brought me CBS CNN and three versions of C-span. Late at night all there was was the C-span stuff that included three different hearings on High Speed Rail. One hearing before the Senate, were Sen Boxer went on a rant about the need for Possitive Train Control---"highlighted by the recent DC train collision" she entered into the record a letter by her and the other California senator about the "long overdue need for Positive Train Control." She was totally unaware that the DC trains a type of that system and were operating under its control. Anyway the sum total of the hearings is this: they defined high speed rail as follows, "traditional high speed rail is 120 mph or less, and true high speed rail as 200 mph or more." Brought out in the meetings, traditional high speed could share with freight trains, but would prefer not to, true high speed would be high speed passenger only, they would prefer to use existing rail corridors to reduce right of way costs and to get to center of cities, they would boot off freight if they felt the need, in some cases freight would be relocated or "forced to share" right of way---they complained that freight railroads not keen on giving up capacity to high speed rail (hence the forcing issue came up.) In all the meetings, freight rail considerations came up only 6 times---only once in preserving freight capacity, rest in dealing with and taking from freight. Management of high speed operations never clearly defined, maybe Amtrak was mentioned, otherwise not discussed. Focus is on building now so we can get people off the roads save energy and be green. (words "Green" and "Carbon Footprint" mentioned thousands of times.) They want trains to be electric, but no source of that power was mentioned---I guess they are just going to plug them in.?? Cost only mentioned when it came to right of way, otherwise money is no object. $12 billion a year was called for at on of the hearings. Called C-span and they said that they "might" rebroadcast these hearings during August recess, watch for them, they are very difficult to watch as the BS is pretty thick, but the only real reflection of what's going on.