China has had the most dramatic high speed rail transformation, but plenty of European countries have developed solid systems without going “full dictatorship.”
Also, the USA used to skip over a lot of those legal hurdles when it came time to build a railroad (hence the phrase, “getting railroaded”) but for various reasons we’ve lost the political will to do this.
I wonder about that with the UK. We already have a rail network, it’s just old. Presumably we could upgrade it if we really wanted to without having to worry about securing the land, but there’s presumably just no will to do it.
China has had the most dramatic high speed rail transformation, but plenty of European countries have developed solid systems without going “full dictatorship.”
Also, the USA used to skip over a lot of those legal hurdles when it came time to build a railroad (hence the phrase, “getting railroaded”) but for various reasons we’ve lost the political will to do this.
I wonder about that with the UK. We already have a rail network, it’s just old. Presumably we could upgrade it if we really wanted to without having to worry about securing the land, but there’s presumably just no will to do it.