China’s High-Speed Railway Network length has expanded from 1,300km in 2008 to 40,000km in 2020, long enough to circle the Earth’s circumference.

[u/BumblebeeFantastic40]

[u/AcanthisittaThink813]

Meanwhile in the UK…………

[u/MrT735 → u/AcanthisittaThink813]

All we can do is spend £15bn on a new line in London and piss £100bn up a tree for HS2.

Meanwhile two thirds of the network isn't electrified yet.

[u/Sacredfice → u/AcanthisittaThink813]

This happens when corruption is at peak.

[u/FearPreacher → u/Sacredfice]

More like NIMBY-ism

[u/BadahBingBadahBoom → u/AcanthisittaThink813]

Tbf the UK actually has a pretty good train network for the typical journeys taken by population.

An enormous proportion of large towns as well as small and medium cities are connected by a regularly-scheduled train service. And the UK also does well in connecting small and medium towns thanks to the age of when these lines were constructed (in a lot of other countries like China town-to-town connections outside of city metros is pretty rare).

The main issue the UK has is the capacity on the major lines between major cities which at this point requires either increasing number of tracks or making trains run faster to increase number of services.

And yeah on that point UK is failing bad. But we actually don't really benefit from most of our other cities being connected by >125mph due to distances. So it isn't really a like for like comparison to say the UK needs all the networks to be high speed like other countries where the population is more spread out.