Comment by exasperaited

There is definitely leasing of freight and passenger trains in mainland Europe, albeit not on the UK scale -- there are at least thousands of leased passenger trains in Europe as I had understood it, including some trains leased by predominantly UK-based ROSCOs like Beacon, AFAIK.

But admittedly that comment was mostly my brain blipping while creating that sentence by settling on the old, broader definition of "Europe" where we used to be significant and that I sometimes use when talking to Americans, hence the subclause clarification about the UK within it.

The point I was getting to is that outside the USA (which definitely has nationally-specific rail vehicles like Amtrak and BART) things are broadly commoditised and relatively off-the-shelf, both in the rail-specific hardware sense and in the wider construction sense.

I don't think there is anything particularly different between building a road and building a railway line in terms of construction skills, and indeed where major roads and rail in the UK are concerned there's at least half a dozen or so major construction firms doing both, right? Clancy, Balfour Beatty, Octavius, Eurovia, Babcock etc. (and those are mostly just names I remember seeing out of train windows)