<table> </table> With great fanfare, President Barack Obama recently announced plans for a national high-speed rail network. It would include a route linking Kansas City and St. Louis.</p><p>This generated a lot of excitement among rail buffs, but on closer examination the plan is mostly puffery. It doesn&#8217;t offer enough money for even one fully functioning high-speed rail line &#8212; not even close.</p><p>A total of $8 billion was set aside in the stimulus package for the effort. Obama said he would try to budget an additional $5 billion over the next five years for high-speed rail. Relative to what&#8217;s needed, those are minuscule amounts.</p><p>People in California have been talking for years about high-speed rail service. The project&#8217;s latest cost estimate: $50 billion.</p><p>Because of numbers like that, initial support for bullet-train projects can fade. In 2000, Florida voters approved a 320-mile high-speed train from Tampa to Miami. Four years later, with the price tag rising to $25 billion, the plan was repealed. Later estimates put the project&#8217;s cost at more than $50 billion.</p><p>Under Obama&#8217;s plan, money would be doled out in two phases. Phase one would be for projects &#8220;that can be completed quickly and yield measurable, near-term job creation.&#8221; Phase two would be for &#8220;comprehensive high-speed programs covering entire corridors.&#8221;</p><p>States will compete for money as they do for other transportation funds.</p><p>Rod Massman, railroads administrator for the Missouri Department of Transportation, says the state will seek some of that money to upgrade tracks on Missouri&#8217;s cross-state Amtrak route. The eventual goal is to allow passenger trains to reach 90 mph.</p><p>But even after this work, the trains could go 90 only on certain stretches of track between Jefferson City and St. Louis. That&#8217;s because much of that part of the route is already double-tracked and there are fewer railroad crossings.</p><p>But here&#8217;s the catch. Despite the investment of taxpayer money, the track will remain an asset of its current owner, Union Pacific. Amtrak trains mostly travel on tracks owned by private freight railroads.</p><p>Which brings us to high-speed rail&#8217;s fundamental problem: Financially speaking, making this happen is a bit like the jump to light speed in science fiction. You can&#8217;t get there with incremental improvements. Instead, you need entirely new rail lines.</p><p>As it&#8217;s generally defined, high-speed rail is passenger service that averages 150 mph. The trains require their own exclusive track and rights of way. And as Massman points out, those rights of way can&#8217;t have crossings.</p><p>So a bridge or underpass must be built for cars whenever the tracks encounter a highway. All of this makes high-speed rail enormously expensive and, in most parts of the country, a fantasy.</p><p>If you believe high-speed rail is coming to a town near you, here&#8217;s how the process probably would unfold.</p><p>First, under phase one, state officials will invest stimulus-package money to upgrade existing tracks, allowing Amtrak trains to run faster.</p><p>Now, let&#8217;s suppose that the vast amounts of money needed for high-speed rail somehow became available. After spending money upgrading existing tracks, officials would then essentially start over: They would begin buying up land and laying track for the separate route needed for a bullet train.</p><p>How many would ride high-speed rail to St. Louis? The Missouri Amtrak service, for which state taxpayers pay $8 million a year, has a current ridership of 150,000 a year. That&#8217;s only about 410 people a day.</p><p>More would use a faster train, no doubt, but it&#8217;s impossible to say how many &#8212; especially given that many travelers would wonder how they&#8217;d get around after arriving.</p><p>At the very least, this is an idea with a glaring cost-benefit problem. No one should expect to be buying tickets for bullet trains to St. Louis any time soon.