If you were to make the same comparison in the US it would be very similar. A lot of railroads were abandoned or turned into trails. Those that remained were s

If you were to make the same comparison in the US it would be very similar. A lot of railroads were abandoned or turned into trails. Those that remained were stripped as much as possible to fire sell assets in desperate attempts to improve the balance sheets (de-electrified to sell the copper, reduced tracks from 4 to 2 or 2 to 1 to sell the rails, etc.) At least part of it is that in some US jurisdictions railroads have to pay property tax on their assets, which is not something that (usually) publicly owned roads and airports deal with. This is a massive perverse incentive to run everything as skimpy as possible to reduce the value of land.