Hopefully you'll be alive in 20 years too. It's the old adage about the best time to plant a tree. The US has been avoiding high speed rail for decades leaning on excuses about time & cost; it's a form of being crippled by short-term thinking.
Connecting Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, will take at least a decade, more likely closer to 15 years. There is no real scenario where it happens faster.
From El Paso you push to Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque.
From Houston you go to New Orleans.
From Dallas you go to Oklahoma City.
Then if other cities are smart at all and pick up some confidence about what can be done, and at a reasonable cost, you then see eg St Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago all link up. And so on.
The model for the US will be regional high speed rail, rather than massive scale coast to coast approaches. Maybe eventually you get high speed interlinking between them.
Charlotte to Atlanta to Jacksonville to Orlando to Tampa to Miami.
Atlanta or Jacksonville to Mobile and on to New Orleans, which gets you to Texas via Houston.
El Paso to Tucson/Phoenix gets you to Vegas. Properly that's an easy hop to Los Angeles (skepticism warranted because it's infrastructure in California), which gets you LA to Texas to Miami.
If they did it right, Texas ends up acting as the obvious central web that you can tie the country together with high speed rail over time.
We could build all of this for $400 billion perhaps, if it's done as it will be in Texas in terms of time & cost (enter the land & zoning nightmares in some parts of the country); $20b per year for 20 years (non inflation adjusted), which we can easily afford.
Why these big switchbacks, like atl-jax-orl and orl-tpa-mia? Kind of out of the way for little benefit. Perhaps Orlando could be a hub, with lines going NE, NW, SW, and SE.
Connecting Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, will take at least a decade, more likely closer to 15 years. There is no real scenario where it happens faster.
From El Paso you push to Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque.
From Houston you go to New Orleans.
From Dallas you go to Oklahoma City.
Then if other cities are smart at all and pick up some confidence about what can be done, and at a reasonable cost, you then see eg St Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago all link up. And so on.
The model for the US will be regional high speed rail, rather than massive scale coast to coast approaches. Maybe eventually you get high speed interlinking between them.