Both panels cover the same span of ground. Every route at 200 km/h or faster is lit; everything faint behind it is the rest of the railway.

China: 35 high-speed routes, 25,291 km. The US: 2 routes, 1,111 km.

The part I did not expect is what happens when you rank by what the trains actually average end to end rather than by top speed. China’s slowest high-speed line, Datong to Xi’an, averages 143 km/h. America’s fastest, the Acela, averages 110. The Acela is rated at 257 km/h, but a top speed describes a section of track and an average describes the trip you take.

I made this from a free railway atlas I build as a hobby, and the route geometry is traced from OpenStreetMap. Happy to answer questions about the method, and corrections are genuinely welcome; forum readers have already fixed several errors in it.

One caveat I would rather state than have pointed out: it is a curated atlas of notable routes, not a national inventory, so China’s real network is bigger than the 35 routes shown here.

Every route and the method: https://trainrouter.com/fastest-trains