The Alps is not the answer when you look at all the tunnels that are already there (both in Austria and Switzerland). Rather, for Austria the answer would be 'b

The Alps is not the answer when you look at all the tunnels that are already there (both in Austria and Switzerland). Rather, for Austria the answer would be 'because it's a small country with one big city', so purely from the local perspective it doesn't make sense to build up high speed rail. And for that to change we would need an earnest EU-wide effort, possibly even a crossborder rail company, that would build the missing links and possibly even operate the crossborder trains. Because currently the infrastructure owners and big train operators are state owned and have little incentive to build and operate fast crossborder trains.