Central and South Europe have a shitload of mountains. Traversing them will be a total pain as infrastructure to build for high speed rail. North of the alps a

Central and South Europe have a shitload of mountains. Traversing them will be a total pain as infrastructure to build for high speed rail. North of the alps and south of the Scandinavian is doable, but a lot of that territory is Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. You have a natural corridor that can connect france with finland - which maps nicely with the hanseatic league territories. But from Athens to Amsterdam there is no way to build competitive train service compared to flights.