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Northwest Thank you. A while ago I found on-line by sheer chance (and could not find it again) a documentary made by a US TV company that examinded the question. It showed work being done on that line in California, and a train on the Washington - Boston line.
I think it did mention the airlines, but its main point seemed to be that once the USA had recovered from WW2 and could concentrate again on domestic, civilian matters the automotive industries mounted a massive advertising and lobbying campaign to put Federal money behind roads rather than railways.
A slightly similar thing happened in Britain but complicated by the much more direct effects of the War. That had left the railways in a dreadful state by bomb damage and the shortages of skilled maintenance (many railwaymen of course were away fighting) and materials throughout the War.
They were run by four large private companies, from Govt-enforced "Groupings" (amalgamations) of many smaller firms in the 1930s. These four started to rebuild themselves, but were then nationalised as British Railways in 1948. BR started a big modernisation scheme, but in the 1960s another Labour government (ironically) commissioned a review by Dr. Richard Beeching into the system's economics. This became notorious for its wholesale destrution of much of the network, forever associated with him but it was actually two Labour Ministers, Ernest Marples and Barbara Castle, who were behind it - and Marples at least had a big personal stake in the newly-started motorway-building programme.
Things did improve and BR, before being broken up into State-ownded "Network Rail" and an Byzantine tangle of commercial "train-operating company" and maintenance franchisees, started to create modern, High-Speed trains capable of using the existing main lines at speeds up to 125mph. (140 in a few places).
Now we have an odd situation where in a country too small and crowded phsyically to justify a High Speed line in the French or Japanese style, the government has decreed we will have one, "HS2", on a brand-new, specially-built line from London to the North of England, barely 300 miles away! Yet its electrifying of main lines in SW England has stalled, by shortage of money - comparing its massively over-engineered overheads gantries with long-established designs elsewhere on Network Rail, I am not suprised.
Rail passenger and freight transport in Britain has increased greatly in the last few decades largely as a result of faster and in places, more trains; but at cost of crowded trains; and of serious disruption on a congested network from single engineering failures, external obstructions, or suicides. (Suicides are the most common but least publicised external cause.)
Some stations closed by "Beeching" have been re-opened, others have been enlarged; some closed lines might be re-built where feasible. The Castle/Marples/Beeching plan allegedly included selling key railway land precisely to prevent re-opening.
You can't just send any spare freight loco out to tow a broken-down train to a safe station loop either. Our elected lot, of both main parties, over the years have replaced Britain's train-building expertise in the country that invented it, with assembling Japanese kits; and made no attempt to enforce compatible couplings between all designs - a desirable feature established way back in the 19C. The railwayman who told me that, added "That's privatisation for you!"
Trouble is too... who owns it? Huge swathes of the UK's rail services and I think HS2, are run by foreign railway systems, money-traders and even States; so the profits go out of the country and there is no real strategic control over it all; though our Government can, and occasionally has, taken over failed franchises.
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That's politicians for you.
You need 'em to find the money and overall planning, but don't let 'em try to dictate anything the least bit technical.
Most of them wouldn't even know a locomotive from a train!
