Passage Locomotives Were First Invented in England, with the First Major

Passage
Locomotives were first invented in England, with the first major railroad connecting Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.  However, it was in America that railroads would be put to the greatest use in the nineteenth century.  On May 10, 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines met at Promontory Point, Utah, joining from opposite directions to complete a years-long project-the Transcontinental Railroad.  This momentous event connected the eastern half of the United States with its western frontier and facilitated the construction of additional lines in between.  As a result, journeys that had previously taken several months by horse and carriage now required less than a week's travel.  By 1887 there were nearly 164,000 miles of railroad tracks in America, and by 1916 that number had swelled to over 254,000.Although the United States still has the largest railroad network in the world, it operates largely in the background of American life, and citizens no longer view trains with the sense of importance those machines once commanded.  Nevertheless, the economic and industrial advantages those citizens enjoy today would not have been possible without America's history of trains; as Tom Zoellner reminds us, "Under the skin of modernity lies a skeleton of railroad tracks."  Although airplanes and automobiles have now assumed greater prominence, the time has arrived for the resurgence of railroads.  A revitalized and advanced railway system would confer numerous essential benefits on both the United States and the globe.The chief obstacles to garnering support for such a project are the current dominance of the automobile and the languishing technology of existing railroads.  In a sense these two obstacles are one, as American dependence on personal automobiles is partially due to the paucity of rapid public transportation.  The railroads of Europe and Japan, by comparison, have vastly outpaced their American counterparts.  Japan has operated high-speed rail lines continuously since 1964, and in 2007, a French train set a record of 357 miles per hour.  While that speed was achieved under tightly controlled conditions, it still speaks to the great disparity in railroad development between the United States and other countries since the mid-twentieth century.  British trains travel at speeds much higher than those in America, where both the trains themselves and the infrastructure to support them have simply been allowed to fall behind.  In much of Europe it is common for trains to travel at close to 200 miles per hour.To invest in a modern network of railroads would improve the United States in much the same way that the first railroads did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  A high-speed passenger rail system would dramatically transform American life, as travel between cities and states would become quicker and more convenient, encouraging commerce, business, and tourism.  Such a system would also make important strides in environmental preservation.  According to a 2007 British study, "CO₂ emissions from aircraft operations are...at least five times greater" than those from high-speed trains.  For similar reasons, Osaka, Japan, was ranked as "the best…green transportation city in Asia" by the 2011 Green City Index.  As Lee-in Chen Chiu notes in The Kyoto Economic Review, Osakans travel by railway more than twice as much as they travel by car.It is true that developing a countrywide high-speed rail system would come with significant costs.  However, that was also true of the original Transcontinental Railroad, as indeed it is with virtually any great project undertaken for the public good.  We should thus move ahead with confidence that the rewards will outweigh the expenditure.  Both for society's gain and the crucial well-being of the planet, our path forward should proceed upon rails.
-The strength of the author's proposal depends most on whether which of the following claims is true?

A) The airline and car industries have undue influence over American travel.
B) A high-speed railroad network would encourage economic activity.
C) The superiority of foreign railroads disadvantages America in international trade.
D) The public would readily adopt high-speed rail travel if it were available.