To get an answer your question, consider the PI on a grant who's located in, say, Champaign, IL, or Carbondale, IL, and who needs to fly internationally to atte

To get an answer your question, consider the PI on a grant who's located in, say, Champaign, IL, or Carbondale, IL, and who needs to fly internationally to attend a conference. (Or, perhaps more direly, needs to attend some family emergency.) With rail alignments going, say, STL-CHM-CHI and STL-CDL-NVL, and with those alignments being wallclock time-competitive with just driving, the opportunity exists now for those PIs not to have to worry about, e.g., the roadworthiness of their cars or whether they'll have to account for traffic for the two- or three-hour commute to the airport. Extend this to cover other folks who live away from major metropolises but who could be served with better airport access, or college students from those metropolises (or even internationally) whose schools are in places not particularly conveniently served by air, and this plan might start to appear to do measurable good. To compare this with Europe, flying into FRA out of ORD (after a cramped puddle jumper flight out of STL and several hours' layover) and taking the ICE to Offenburg to visit family for Easter was a thing I did for years, and I found the German side far less agonizing. There were some years when I never even bothered to purchase my Bahn fare until I could get to the DB Reisezentrum in the basement of FRA because the frequency of the trains made it certain I'd not have to wait long.