Agree. Amtrak is doing what's correct: if they're buying trains now or soon (next few years), then they don't need anything that goes faster than 160 - only small parts of their system now can even support 150 and they don't and won't (in the reasonably foreseeable future) have the money to do more that add a couple more short high-speed segments. So they correctly prioritize operation in the lower end of the high-speed range.

Consider, per Travelmath.com: Sacramento-Los Angeles is 403 miles driving. DC-Boston MA is 441 miles (DC-NYC is 229). Bay Area to LA is slightly less to slightly more than Sac-LA depending on where you start from. A from-scratch HSR line can't be much less than the driving distance absent some Really Expensive Tunneling. Look at the difference in populations at each end of the line AND IN THE MIDDLE, and tell me whether CA can support even a set of NE Regionals let alone Acela+. The population in the middle is the real killer - NEC has Baltimore, Philly and many others; CA has Fresno and Bakersfield. Is higher math necessary to figure this out?

What CA needs is good conventional passenger service, like Europe has had for 100 years. That would mean speeds up to 125-130 where feasible, but mostly in the high sub-100 range. IOW NE Regionals which (with AEM7's) run up to 125 in spots (mostly 110 or less, though) but, more importantly, can accelerate quickly from stops contributing to decent average speeds. Current diesels (F59PHIs for instance) can't produce that kind of acceleration with normal trains, which is needed for real passenger service for which you don't have to check a clock before heading to the station.

Limiting factors in CA are 1) track-sharing with freight RRs, which practically limits speeds to 80-90 mph tops; lack of good connections from the Valley (where the in-between population, such as it is, and decent speeds are) to LA and Bay Area - if we're going to spend Real Money (denominated in $10e09) then those are the places to start, with a little pocket change in the Valley to fix bottlenecks like Fresno; and lack of somebody with both money and vision (JerryB is missing substantial chunks of both). And, like Amtrak, if we're looking for Transportation Service for the masses, it's not worth going for the ultimate speed; 150-160 (say 180 tops for expresses in the Valley) is more than Good Enough. So with a realistic system we could use the down-scoped Amtrak equipment. The Bond Measure prohibits CAHSR from doing that, as the judges recently pointed out in a sideways manner.

If what we want is not Transportation Service, but rather a high-rollers express between Silicon Valley and Tinseltown, forget about 220 mph trains and throw money at Musk's pipe dream. We'll get about the same return from either.