Hehehehe
With 0.92% of electrified rail it’s a joke to say that NGL. Absolute numbers are meaningless.
You have to see it into perspective per area then you’ll get to feel how dense and therefore useful the rail network actually is. Because what good is a rail network if you can’t reach your desired location.
And then you’ll see that swiss, Germany and Luxembourg for example end up with less than 10 square km per km of rail while the usa has around 40.
Okay, but the comment implied America doesn’t have the expertise to build a passenger network when it actually doesn’t have the political willpower. It has the expertise to spare, but no one in power actually cares.
That still is not correct.
Planning a high speed high throughput flexible passenger rail network is a whole different beast than laying non-electrified single track lines in a straight line through the middle of nowhere that basically only serves the occasional 2miles long freight train.
The parameters are vastly different and almost incomparable. And America has decidedly no expertise left in the former.
Other than the fact that there are several American firms who have already done it, and even if there was a knowledge deficit it’s the easiest thing in the world for an American company to headhunt foreign talent. Too easy in most industries.
Opposition to new railways is political, be it from establishment organizations or private owners, like in California. That’s all there is to it.
