Mr. Bergtold, the "rant" as you refer to it is about the poor judgement being tendered by elected officials in planning and designing urban transit. I realize that money these days is rather tight. If you read my words carefully, what I was bemoaning was the sacrifice of a potentially useful branchline (is 119lb/yd branchline?)for mass transit. I have nothing against BART, other than its guage and 70 mph performance when it was designed for 140 mph. Even though it would have added a considerable amount of construction cost, someone failed to realize that keeping the conventional rail intact or at least provided for future use, will serve the needs of mass transit directly and indirectly. I fear that CAHSR will suffer the same fate that I am addressing here. Every city along the right of way will want the system to service their town. I have made this point several times, but smart transit planning will include lower speed parallel and orthogonal trackage to provide light-rail-like frequent stopping. One may have to ride a couple of stops forward or reverse to get to a "convenient" station. I also believe that modern regulations that make coexistent freight operations impractical are in need of change. Pacific Electric mixed both very well and largely without incident. What really killed PE was public sentiment about having to share the road with trains and the lack of isolation of the rails from asphault. The bottom line is that there is more auto traffic in California than we can cost-effectively accomodate. And we the public are not getting enough bang for the bucks we are spending. For my two million cents worth, they could have upgraded the WP trackage and built a system that would have been a lot cheaper, and performed nearly as well, and could have been connected at the Fremont BART station. All without necessarily sacrificing freight possibility. OK, I'll call it a rant, but now do you understand what I'm talking about?