America's rail faces significant challenges those other countries don't. An equivalent rail track in the US is vastly more expensive, new right-of-ways are much

America's rail faces significant challenges those other countries don't. An equivalent rail track in the US is vastly more expensive, new right-of-ways are much, much harder to acquire, especially near cities, and even when you do connect two metros that are in the happy medium where high speed rail can typically beat car and plane, you still find yourself that your terminals are low density sprawl, so the car will be more attractive in distances where in, say, Spain, it's just not. Some connection pairs are probably still worth doing anyway, but we won't get the multi million trips a year of a really successful line in many cases. So it's all a much harder sell