It's hard to overstate how much southern Germany, Switzerland, France, and northern Italy are profiting from the new alpine tunnels being bored: Basis Brenner t

It's hard to overstate how much southern Germany, Switzerland, France, and northern Italy are profiting from the new alpine tunnels being bored: Basis Brenner tunnel, Lyon-Turin tunnel, and the Gotthard base tunnel. Last one already opened 10 years ago, but it's still pretty recent when it comes to infrastructure projects of that size. As for inner-German train transport being slow... it's thanks to a bunch of reasons, like a) Germany having been divided in two until 30 years ago, so railways to Berlin have not been the top priority. in fact, one didn't really want to give russians, whose army mainly used railway to transport, the infrastructure to invade west Germany. b) the German car industry is running the country and ofc they want people to drive and not use DB, so investments went/are going into the Autobahnen instead of the railways. c) Germany both being multi-centered and shaped like a square. France has the Paris star, UK has London, and Italy is multi centered but it has this elongated shape, so south of the Po valley the high speed railroads (roughly) follow the coastlines.