I never talked about high speed rail. I think most of the times it's a huge cash sink (especially the 300km/h ones where you need a lot of tunnels and bridges) Maintaining the existing infrastructure so you could ride the planned speeds and avoid delays would be a huge win. If we look at Europe, the countries that don't bet big on high speed have a dense network and more people riding Rail, and then the countries who've built a lot of High Speed Lines which sped up the connection between a few huge cities at the cost of all the middle cities in-between who have lost most of their rail services.