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Find direct train connections within Europe
(direkt.bahn.guru)
A place for your preferably unique useful or fun sites and kind of a bookmark manager for me :p
There is simple answer: there is too much to maintain.
As a Czech I can tell that we have the denses rail network in Europe because we were in centre of Austria-Hungary. Communists didn't want to tear it down and expanded public transport...
Now even with heavy subsidies it is just too much.
At least in Germany it's due to partial privatization. To a degree. We still think it should be profitable and don't treat it as the critical infrastructure it is.
Here it is also partially privatised, but only train providers. National rail maintainer is SŽDC. I think that it is similar in Germany.