I know. That's why for a merged RIPTA-MBTA (NERTA, peut-être?), I'd organize it as:
*Rapid transit for Boston and Providence.
Do two separate cities ever merge their local rapid transit operations, let alone in different states? Tokyo and Yokohama don't, Seoul and Incheon don't, New York and Newark don't.
Besides, why would a city the size of Providence even have a subway? I know there were plans in the 1920s, but the 1960s weren't the 1920s.
It's just too implausible.
*Commuter rail for Boston and Providence. These would be separate systems. For Rhode Island it would be mixed with rapid transit for Providence, and hence the model here is not the RER but a hybrid of Cleveland's Rapid (for rapid transit) and Sydney's former CityRail (for rapid transit and commuter rail), hence making rapid transit akin to both a revival of the interurban and a modern tram-train operation.
First, the Cleveland Red Line is 31 km end to end, and goes suburb-downtown-suburb, so the actual distance it goes out of the center is more like 15-20 km. Second, I'm not bringing up the RER as a model, but as a sanity check.
CityRail, besides not connecting two different cities but one city and its unusually far-flung suburbs, has a special property that MBTA-RIPTA doesn't: it's all in one state.
The thinking here is that, per FDW's suggestion, instead of a single Amtrak running all passenger rail services, things would be regionalised along the lines of the JR Group, both in terms of intercity rail and regional/commuter rail.
Nobody regionalizes intercity service like this. No, not even Japan: the formation of the JRs was part of a
privatization process, in which JNR was chopped down to more manageable size by private investors. In the US, either the intercity trains would've stayed private (if your POD is early enough to allow for profitable passenger rail) or they'd have been taken over by the federal government.
And there's a reason why it's so. Intercity trains form national networks, or close to national networks. They cross state boundaries, and sometimes need to go through states without making major stops. The Downeaster doesn't serve the parts of New Hampshire that need service the most. That's why even federal states like the US, Germany, Switzerland, and Canada nationalized intercity trains instead of letting their subnational entities take over.
Understandable, but TF Green Airport does provide important service for those of us who prefer not to use Logan.
I can totally see Rhode Island building a link in an ATL, but it would be 100% useless, just like in OTL. There's a very good way of getting to T. F. Green: it's called cars. Providence doesn't have the congestion, the parking difficulties, or the large non-airport transit system to make transit even vaguely competitive. Today's MBTA service is so infrequent and slow that it gets practically no ridership. You can improve service - either in OTL or in an ATL - but that doesn't make it competitive with driving.
Of course, transit agency splurging on comically underperforming airport links is very far from a US-only problem. I can see this happening in an ATL, just like in a country in OTL with generally solid transit investment you still get
airport links with an order of magnitude less ridership than originally predicted.
Reagan was a New Deal Democrat until around the second Red Scare, so I'd actually say that his views are rather flexible. I should point out that butterflies in Politics at the macro level (Mainly around the civil rights movement) shift around the political landscape in a way that preserves the post-war consensus for another 20 years, before collapsing in a more dramatic fashion than OTL.
The Southern racists were New Deal Democrats back then, too. Remember, 60% of the US voted for FDR, and that was when most black people were disenfranchised.
More broadly, right-wing populism the way we know it is a postwar creation. We can see this rightward move in the SVP or the Social Credit Party, and in the US we can see this by comparing how rural areas voted in 1936 and how they vote today (or even in 1980). A lot of ideas that the right-wing populists could accept in the 30s as Good for Normal People became characterized as communism by the postwar era, and even when they weren't, they were characterized as Good for Deviant People. Economic growth ensured that by the postwar era, the median person was middle-class and not working-class. The robber barons became a distant memory, and the postwar consensus ensured that the new rich people would be celebrated as national heroes.
The decision to do Tehachapi over Tejon was less a result of Las Vegas wanting in and more a result of trying to get the freight railroads to buy in increasing freight capacity going between the coastal ports and the East coast, though Nevada barging in certainly tipped the balance in favor. (The Air Force liking the freight idea helped too)
Freight doesn't use HSR; for the purposes of freight, it doesn't matter where HSR goes. Consider the following:
1. American heavy freight runs at low speeds and high axle loads, such that any track-sharing with fast passenger trains is impossible. This isn't Swiss fast freight we're talking about.
2. The HSR line would not be a base tunnel, but rather have significant grades, even if they're 1.5-2% and not 3.5%. Freight dislikes these. The new Cajon Pass track actually increased the total line length and reduced curve radius in order to reduce the ruling grade.
3. When the D&RGW tried running fast freight, it was absolutely pummeled by the oil crisis; when it bought Southern Pacific, it went with SP's slow, low-cost approach. Electrification would've forestalled it, but before 1973, nobody was thinking about electrification over thousands of km of freight mainline. Even if your POD ends up making electrification look better, it's really unlikely anyone would electrify a mainline early.
4. Interstates were built for both trucks and passenger cars. I-5 still goes over Tejon.
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