Perhaps the OP included the cost to indicate it compared favourably with the cost of air travel and private car travel over the same route? I understand this w

Perhaps the OP included the cost to indicate it compared favourably with the cost of air travel and private car travel over the same route? I understand this wouldn't have been true for similarly distanced cites in USA, and I know from experience it wasn't true for London - HSR to Paris or Amsterdam was always several times more expensive than flying, and even domestic intercity rail was notoriously more expensive than flying internationally.