Two rail specific issues I know of that drive up project costs (without getting into the blown up infrastructure costs we seem to face):
* Extremely heavy rail cars, some almost twice the weight as their European counterparts. This is determined by Federal Rail Administration requirements about crash safety with freight trains on shared lines. Crash safety here being just throwing more steel in the cars. This drives up design, capital, fuel costs, and rail maintenance, not to mention severely limits train performance.
Compare two trainsets from around when Amtrak's Acela was built:
German Siemens Velaro E;
Top design speed: 350 km/h
Weight: 439 tons
Capacity: 405 passengers
Acela Express:
Top design speed: 266 km/h
Weight: 565 tons
Capacity: 304 passengers
* FRA mandated "Buy American" requirement, which forces federally funded rail projects to buy equipment manufactured in America. Of course we long ago killed off our domestic passenger rail industry, so now projects must pay European manufacturers to tool essentially temporary factories to build already overpriced rail cars on a project by project basis.
Projects can apply to the FRA for waivers for both, such as the case with the California HSR project, but it adds friction.
I think there is an affect where nobody resisted regulation creep because nobody was building a lot of passenger train lines anyway.
There is something analogous with city center housing in Sweden. For decades not much was built. The population is fairly stable and many were moving to suburbs anyway. Today, not everyone wants a suburban house, and nobody wants to live in '60s concrete "housing project" exclaves, so central apartment prices and rents skyrocket. But now you cannot build the kind of central flats people want any more, because of decades of accumulated regulations about noise, sun angles, parking quotas, etc. The market is dominated by 50-100 year old buildings that predate the regulations and are very popular.
Same thing here in Boston--three story detached houses, with one apartment per story, are the most popular form of housing here, and yet have been illegal to build for the past 100 years (with a few exceptions) due to being too dense for single-family zoned areas and being a fire hazard. It's odd that there is no "build out of non-flammable materials" exception for the latter.
So like almost all problems in America it goes back to a broken federal government and regulatory regime which is partially to do with a corrupt, pork barrel Congressional culture and partially do with aggressive "starve the beast" underfunding approaches to government due to disdain for it.
* Extremely heavy rail cars, some almost twice the weight as their European counterparts. This is determined by Federal Rail Administration requirements about crash safety with freight trains on shared lines. Crash safety here being just throwing more steel in the cars. This drives up design, capital, fuel costs, and rail maintenance, not to mention severely limits train performance.
Compare two trainsets from around when Amtrak's Acela was built:
German Siemens Velaro E;
Top design speed: 350 km/h Weight: 439 tons Capacity: 405 passengers
Acela Express:
Top design speed: 266 km/h Weight: 565 tons Capacity: 304 passengers
* FRA mandated "Buy American" requirement, which forces federally funded rail projects to buy equipment manufactured in America. Of course we long ago killed off our domestic passenger rail industry, so now projects must pay European manufacturers to tool essentially temporary factories to build already overpriced rail cars on a project by project basis.
Projects can apply to the FRA for waivers for both, such as the case with the California HSR project, but it adds friction.
http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-n...
http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185