Before WWII Great Britain, Germany, and France all had about twice the rail they have now . After the war, cars and trucking made a big difference and system length decreased fairly steadily as a result because lots of track got rebuilt as roads.
The vast European rail network has enabled much of troop movements during both world wars, but at the present time we only have about 50% of rail infrastructure compared to before WW2. The other half has been destroyed.
That can be misleading if these are the late 19th / early 20th century railroad tracks which got dismantled in most of the west (due to road competition) especially as it's unlikely they got upgraded. For instance the french railway system has contracted by half since its height in 1914, Belgium's didn't contract quite that much but not far (according to wikipedia there were 5300km of tracks in 1912, today there are 3600).
Many of the smaller single-track ways linking small villages got progressively abandoned during the 50s and 60s, as local train lines were replaced by buses, cars and trucks (for freight).
The UK has quite high speeds (125-140mph) on its conventional rail lines all on lines that were first built between 1850-1900 but have been gradually realigned to be faster. Most war damage was to the junctions not the route alignment out in open country so there were improvements in throughput at junctions made by rationalisation of the layout but routes between cities weren’t realigned because of war damage.
There is some path dependency here, trains came earlier than cars and early industrialised nations build rail networks that were far more extensive than they are now. There were also freight trams in cities like Berlin, which delivered cargo to smaller industrial sites in the city.
US trains were majorly useful and common way to travel before the 1960s. (Only a few miles dropped after WW2.) But in the early 1950s, a plan to build 41,000 miles of Interstate freeways appeared. And Eisenhower selected the Chairman of General Motors to be his Secretary of Defense. The plan was signed into law in 1956, and construction began. It was quite a boon to the auto industry.
By 1967 passenger train ridership had plummeted. Most people and a whole lot of freight shifted to the freeways and/or jetliners. Railroads could not compete. In 1952 there were 370 thousand miles of track. By 1992 that had dropped to 190 thousand miles.[0] Much track steel was recycled, and many rural railbeds became 'trailways'.
Does the U.S. have the curse of being first? Europe got to largely rebuild their rail from scratch after WWII whereas U.S. rail has been where it is for a very long time.
Well, the fact that te government subsidized the automotive and oil industries with the Federal highway act in '56 lead to our deprioritization of rail. Had this not been the case, chances are we'd have European equivalent rail, and the small local trolley systems that dotted americas small and medium sized cities would never have been torn up.
Europe also had a big military imperative to build railways pre-WW1: Trains let you move your forces faster, so you can build up a concentration of forces in one location to attack or reinforce a defensive line.
So no state in continental Europe wanted to be on the losing side of a railway gap.
Semi related: “How big should a railroad track be?” Is actually an extremely complicated question that took a long time for us to figure out. It wasn’t unusual for different states to have different gauges, often requiring that passengers change trains at state lines.
Also, Russia to this day uses its own gauge, because they’re terrified of being invaded via rail from Europe.
Well, maybe Europe built itself with government projects, but apart from some dubious transcontinental rail lines, America's "original" heavy and light rail systems were built by combinations of corporate, municipal and state entities. Roads were municipal matters, heavy trucks were seldom seen as that channel grew in symbiosis with the Eisenhower Highway system. Heavy trucks drive the need for durable roads, and they just weren't the norm until the Fed subsidized the crap out of inter-city highways and regulated the rail (most predominantly: the Pennsylvania RR) until if collapsed. Light-rail had its own similar history with roads and busses (and the fight for "right-of-way" at street level).
But what about all the empty track between trains? When you consider that, it starts to level out. I'd be very interested in actual numbers though. Edit: Discussion here using quick estimates seems to show rail still wins: https://alankandel.scienceblog.com/2014/01/11/rails-vs-roads...
Instead, we abandoned many rails lines. Just ion my area of the Midwest there are two lines that were unused in the 70-80's. In the 90's they were converted to bike trails. Now the rail companies wish they had those rights-of-way's back to relieve rail congestion in the area.
As a German, I've heard the "but it's difficult to build new lines" excuse many many times.
While it's true, we've had the lines. The little town I was born in had a railway connection. We're 7000 people here. They built a serious bridge and a tunnel to make the connection around 190x or something. The next town over, around 30.000 people, had several stations and additional narrow-gauge track connection all important local factories. Some of them had a direct connections to the "big" railway, too.
So while it may be true that it's difficult to build new railway now, we wouldn't have that problem if we had not let it all go to waste in the 80s and 90s. It's such a shame.
The old bridges and tunnels are out here in the woods, I recently hiked there.
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