You aren’t counting stops which will easily add 6-8 hours to the trip. Also, how many hundreds of billions of dollars are you willing to spend on a money losing light rail network?
Light rail is a fancy name for trolleys. Amtrak and the freight railroads are heavy rail.
I am counting stops. Not as many as the Silver Star makes, though (which stops 36 times en route); most likely stops at Washington DC and a few of the major cities in the Carolinas and Georgia.
A super-express (no stops) could make the journey in a little over seven hours. I’m basing that on the highway distance between the two cities (about 1,279 miles) divided by an average speed of 180 mph, since most new high-speed trains now run at about 196 mph or even faster. Of course, however, the feds want to spend over $200 million per mile on a high-speed railroad through the “Corridor” states (mainly MD/DE/PA/NJ) when the private sector could build cheaper, alongside major highways (if the government would not get in the way of that).
The Maintenance of Way costs of air travel is low, plus the route is not fixed.
