Our high-speed rail research applies global best practices to the Northeast Corridor within the $30 billion budget set by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Those include coordinated planning for intercity and regional trains throughout the East Coast region, improving speed, frequency, and connectivity to save time at low costs. The same comparative perspective that the Transit Costs Project report brings to analyzing metro construction is deployed synthetically to propose a right-size investment that nonetheless achieves speeds comparable to those of trains in Western Europe and high-income Asia.