Monorail or Roller Coaster.
I've heard in the news for years how they are trying to make a high-speed rail Southern California Nevada possibly from LA to Vegas . As an amateur engineer I have researched high speed trains in China, Spain, Japan, and looked into monorails and elevated train systems. China has 45,000 km of "high speed lines", going up to 217 MPH , while USA has 84 miles (operational).
The first and main feature I would design in a high-speed rail is to have it elevated for safety . Seriously. It would have to be unencumbered by railroad crossings or anything else that would interfere with traveling 200 mph plus. 15 to 20 ft in the air would be perfect.
A single beam of concrete (a monorail) spanning 400 miles could be okay. You'd still end up with one wheel on top and 2 sets of wheels on the sides. Like a traditional monorail it could have two or more long cars. I think they would really have to do more tests how fast model like that could go with minimum shaking and to make sure that it's safe.
My second idea was a wide platform 5 ft across and this could give it similarity to a air hockey table if you had powerful fans down and creating a layer of air pressure to ride on. I guess it'd be borrowing from a hovercraft design. Pushing down air and creating virtually no friction.
I'm now thinking that it should be more like a modern roller coaster with a set of two tubes about 5 ft apart. This would make it more stable against rocking back and forth.
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A tethered glider.
Instead of the hovercraft effect, I would go with something more like a glider. Seriously. I could calculate it going fast enough with a short wingspan to give it lift, all you would need is like 3 inches off of the rail, to make it weightless and to give it the smoothest ride because you're almost flying. This would be a controlled gliding, maybe even up to 2 ft in the air to give it an allowance to go up and down to make it even smoother. Of course it wouldn't get air lift until 50 or 100 miles an hour but after that it would be so smooth. I would use the body of a streamlined car and put louvers and spoilers and short wingspans up to 8 ft to give it lift.
In order to keep the car lightweight, the vehicle would be towed by 4 motors clamped to the two rails. These would be attached to 5-ft poles that act as shock absorbers and stabilizers. The car itself would just lower down and rest on these poles until it gets enough speed to start to get lift.
And yes I would use a four-door sedan Style car as the passenger compartment. It would fit two adults and lots of luggage. Or a family up to five. They would be charged a fee according to the combined weight of all passengers, and luggage in the car, and how far the trip is. I think there should be a limit of weight like 500 lb. So if two adults were 500 lb that's the maximum. And for safety all children would have to be accompanied by adult parent or guardian.
A design feature for these very long double tube track system could be stacked the lower level goes one way and the top level goes the opposite. The amount of Real Estate would take up might only be as wide as 20 or 25 ft and it goes up in the air 20 ft.
A safety feature would be to send an unmanned box frame that could travel minutes ahead of the actual car, and this would ensure that the track has no problems. Hopefully being high enough could keep it safe from damage , vandalism, or even sabotage.
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