The Vice President and his wife share a tender moment -- on the Acela. (Photo: NYT)

Biden doesn't get too political in the piece, eschewing calls for more Amtrak funding in favor of a paean to the "emotional connection" he experienced riding the rails during his 36-year congressional career.

But the vice president, who has taken on a central role in the White House's high-speed rail push, closes with a strong endorsement of inter-city trains as pollution reducers:

Consider that if you shut down Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, it is estimated that to compensate for the loss, you'd have to add seven new lanes of highway to Interstate 95. When you consider that it costs an average of $30 million for one linear mile of one lane of highway, you see what a sound investment rail travel is. And that's before you factor in the environmental benefits of keeping millions and millions of cars off the road.

Photo: Sacramento Bee

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden, met with governors from eight different states that are competing for High Speed Rail funding.  Streetsblog's D.C. Correspondent wrote a story about the national implications of the meeting available at our New York site.  While neither Schwarzenegger nor another representative from California was present, there was good news for California.  From today's Times,

"The reason why California is looked at so closely -- it's been a priority of your governor, it's been a priority of your Legislature, they've talked about it, a lot of planning has been done," Biden said in a conference call with reporters.

The vice president said the administration wants "to get shovel-ready projects out the door as quickly as we can. . . . So California is in the game."

In other words, because California has been working on the San Francisco to San Diego High Speed Rail Corridor, and because voters put up funds for the project in the form of bond money; we have a leg up in applying for federal funds as the Obama Administration makes them available.

And let's be clear, it's not as though the entire corridor were "Shovel Ready" but there are two sets of track that the California High Speed Rail Authority says are ready to go.  The first is local, as the state could connect Los Angeles to Anaheim at a cost of $3 billion.  The second corridor would connect San Francisco to San Jose at somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion.

Back when the federal stimulus was first passed, Ben Fried out of our New York office wrote a pretty brutal takedown of the final bill that I re-posted at the LA Streetsblog.  Supporters of California High Speed Rail were upset for obvious reasons and I defended Fried's post in the comments section by saying.

But that so much of the negotition was done in Harry Reid's office (to the point that Pelosi actually pitched a fit about it according to Politico) and he's already talking about funding for the gamblin' train to Las Vegas, I am mighty sceptical that much, if any, of that money is going to end up being spent on the line we supported last fall. If it does, I'll do a mea culpa post and you can all "I told you so'd" me. I've certainly been willing to do them in the past.

Well, let's just say I'm not quite ready to eat crow just yet, but I got it marinating.  In this case, the crow would taste awfully good.