> Totally honest question - have there been recent expansions of train lines into cities in Europe? In the last 20 years? Yes, absolutely. London's Crossrail o

> Totally honest question - have there been recent expansions of train lines into cities in Europe? In the last 20 years? Yes, absolutely. London's Crossrail opened a few years ago. Paris has been building new RER lines almost continuously. > I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines. Upgrading the existing station and existing lines, or building new lines along the same right-of-way, usually makes sense - the station is already in the right place and connects up to the existing network. E.g. Roma Tiburtina was basically completely flattened and rebuilt, but it's technically an "upgrade". You're mostly right though, to build a new station in a city you absolutely do need a large block that you can reasonably demolish - e.g. in London the planned next high-speed rail station at "Old Oak Common" will be accommodated by demolishing a big prison (Wormwood Scrubs), and it's not exactly central. Or you build completely underground, but that's expensive and you still need to demolish stuff to make a worksite. Frankly building a new station somewhere somewhat out of town is perfectly reasonable as a way of saving money, and generally a new business district will gradually spring up around the station - see e.g. Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, or Shin-Osaka. But you need good metro connections with the CBD, at least to start with, otherwise you end up like Haute-Picardie. IMO a lot of people who want high-speed rail in the US are putting the cart before the horse: you need to build a decent metro in a city before having high-speed rail to that city makes sense, and this kind of thing is exactly why - and one of the reasons this line works is exactly that it can go to a more "outlying" station because LA is one of the few cities in the US that has been building new metro lines over the last few decades.