>>2064512That's bullshit
>>2064745>it is not at all hard to make the rolling stock go fast, it's what's on the ground that limits how fast it can go without derailingA bit of an oversimplification. While wheel/rail contact and bogie dynamics are not fully mastered sciences, making a train go fast goes further than adding power and streamlining it.
>yuropoorean thinking on this is to make the trains go fast, and make ad-hoc improvements here and thereNo? Aside from the yuropisonecountryism, that vision only really applies to historical British high speed rail (ie: not actual HSR. HSTs are lovely but at the end of the day there's nothing special about a DMU doing 125 mph) and similarly early Italian line upgrades to run tilting EMUs at up to 250 km/h (actual budget HSR). Both also had to build actual high speed lines from scratch to break 300 km/h.
France and Spain are fully comparable to Japan, high speed lines have all been built as such and in the case of Spain with a similar track gauge incompatibility.
>>2064760Aside from a weird episode a decade or so ago of some northeastern region of France running TGVs on regional services for job saving reasons, all TGVs run part of their trips on high speed lines, 80-90% of them to or from Paris (with a few trains a day going around Paris, linking Lille to Lyon, Marseilles to Nantes, etc.). They are not a "convenient connection for the smaller French cities", they are a way to get to Paris fast, if you need to go to the regional capital or the region next door, just get a cheap regional train.
And regarding your map, it's only HSR between Massy (on the Paris side) and Rennes or St-Pierre des Corps (or only to Le Mans if you're going to Nantes/Le Croisic/Les Sables). France just took advantage of the lack of track gauge or power supply incompatibility with their low speed network to run TGVs on them, aided sometimes by minor works to bump the regular lines to 220 km/h