herbirdglitter asked:

I have a train question that you are under absolutely no obligation to answer:

We in the US have a tone of abandoned railroad tracks everywhere, right? Is there a reason we can just use and/or redo those tracks?

Because we keep having to knock down houses and are getting embroiled in law suits etc whenever we try and build a new one. The California high speed rail has been under construction forever.

Why can’t we just redo tracks that are already there? Tear them up and lay down new ones?

California High-speed Rail and other High-speed Rail projects would need to build new Rail to reach high speeds, but for conventional Rail, the tracks on most abandoned lines have been allowed to degrade so much that it would be just as costly to build new tracks as it would be to repair them in many cases