I think we paradoxically suffer for being first.
I have commuted to London for the best part of 45 years, There are hundreds of routes but they grew from the independent rail building scramble of the 1800s. The villages surrounding London grew into the available spaces to create the greater London splurge.
So there is no room to create high speed lines into London, unless you tunnel (the so called high speed route to St Pancras). The railway system to London is incontrovertibly f***ed. It cannot be fixed.
Ditto roads. I tried driving into London at one time. Madness.
All of this fossilization of transport was obvious to me 40 years ago. Faster trains won't help. As soon as you hit outer London there are hundreds of trains queuing to navigate limited space.
The only fast train link that has added value is the Ashford to St Pancras connection. And that was apparently the largest civil engineering exercise that Europe has ever seen. It won't be repeated elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Beeching was vandalizing branch lines that were not the main source of financial drain, but their removal did 'justify' road building.
And Thatcher hated trains, so any chance of any reversal of decline was suspended during her tenure at the top.
Or any reversal under WIlson, Heath and Callaghan 1964 to 1979?
We went down the US 'route' of the car is king , under red and blue.