Back in 2010 I wrote a piece about how terrorists would LOVE California’s High Speed Rail (HSR). It appeared in several places, including SDRostra.com (see the link below). It generated an unusual number of comments — with several commenters ridiculing the idea. I strongly recommend you review the article — the comments are also instructive.
https://sdrostra.com/richard-rider/terrorists-will-love-california%E2%80%99s-high-speed-rail/
Fast forward to August 2017 and the WASHINGTON POST publishes a disturbing article about how al-Qaeda has come out with a manual for how to attack trains in America. Suddenly it’s not such a farfetched idea after all.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-ominous-how-to-for-a-terrorist-attack-in-america/2017/08/18/001c0f8a-844b-11e7-ab27-1a21a8e006ab_story.html?utm_term=.510ac54046ff
From a terrorist’s viewpoint, the favorable “cost/benefit, risk/reward” of attacking trains (especially passenger trains) is hard to ignore. Few terrorist attacks are easier to pull off. Over and over. And the terrorist need not die in the attack.
The Islamic “how to” guide specifically highlights the Acela train — a relatively high speed train that runs from Boston to DC. Acela’s top speed supposedly is 135 MPH. A derailment would be catastrophic. Image the carnage if the CA HSR rail were hitting 220 MPH (admittedly another CA HSR fiction, but let’s go with it), when the train was blown off the tracks.
To be fair, all of this was first covered in a detailed 2008 critique of the proposed CA HSR. The Reason Foundation put it out. It included a section pointing out the obvious terrorist threat.
Here’s the link to Reason’s 2013 update to that report.
http://reason.org/studies/show/california-high-speed-rail-report
Everything that the first Reason report warned about regarding the bogus HSR 2008 projections has since been confirmed. Only the CA HSR bureaucracy’s inability to actually BUILD the train has assured that no terrorist attack has occurred.
Yet.