Regarding the comparison of the trains systems in the U.S. vs Europe and Japan,
Do we need to consider that after WWII, the U.S. paid to substantially rebuild the infrastructure of most of those countries, through the Marshall Plan and similar programs? Their rail lines, being military targets for many years, had to have been substantially destroyed. Those countries may tout their great transportations systems, but the fact of the matter is that they would have been substantially third-world countries for 50 years after the war if we hadn't provided the financing to rebuild them. (Query: Did France ever repay its War debt to the U.S. after the War? I doubt it.)
One of my law partners, being 15 years older than me, grew up in Hamburg in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (His father was a Vice President of Ford Motor Europe.) He said that large areas of the city still lay in ruins and rubble at that time.
I don't remember hearing that the U.S. paid hundreds of millions (perhaps billions?) to upgrade our transportation system from the ground up after the War. (Perhaps the closest thing was the building of the Interstate Highway System in the early 1960s?) I can't remember when AMTRAK came into being. Wasn't it in the 1960s?
Mannyrock
