Hating trains because of your experience of rail in the UK is like hating chips because of your experience in McDonalds.
British railways are crap. They are not at all an example of how railways should be run.
A system like that in the Netherlands, Germany or Japan is very good for a country.
Yeah UK trains are godawful but not as bad as the long-distance buses. I have had better service on most heritage railways than I get on either of those.
Talking of railways to americans is like proposing a CSA survival timeline in this forum. Strangely enough, HSR are working everywhere else in the world (but we know that America is different , don't we).
HS vacuum maglev? potentially up to many thousands of km per hour; e.g. LA to NY in 60 minutes acceleration and decelerations factored in. Imagine, getting up in the morning in LA, communiting to work to Manhattam, back by 8pm on the shores of the Pacific. In France, with the TGV, you can live on in Marseille and commute to work in Paris.
You mention coast-to-coast trips in a day but seriously, who needs to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic in a day and is willing to pay the price to do it by this scheme? It is like talking to people who complain about how the closure of the Harlech-Blaenau Ffestionog or the Barmouth-Llangollen lines has made getting to those places so much harder, ignoring the fact that nobody used them in the first place and the local buses are both more frequent and more reliable than the trains were.
teg