Cascadia Rail Summit

A new government report on high speed rail in the Pacific Northwest recommends that Oregon, Washington and British Columbia formalize their interest in a Cascadia bullet train by creating an independent body to plan and eventually build it. But a critic associated with a conservative think tank responded that the region should take heed of California's high speed rail woes and put a spike in the Cascadia bullet train ambitions.

After bemoaning that the state's highways, bridges, ferries and rail cars "are on a glide path to failure," Washington State Department of Transportation Secretary Roger Millar laid out the case for building an ultra-high speed railway on dedicated track.