>>1246789This, but unironically. 90s and 00s were the years when more than 25% of Polish railways got closed or physically disassembled and the rest wasn't properly maintained. Also number of passengers started to drop drastically when communism ended and suddenly everyone could afford a used car imported from Germany. Train system was left in ruins, but last years we started to fix it all up. Newag Impuls (pic related, my favorite Polish train), Pesa ELF and Stadler Flirt are slowly replacing the old EN57 series, neglected railways are being fixed or modernized, and every year more people are starting to use trains for longer and shorter travels. We even have one HSR line, max speed is 200km/h so far but in a few years it should be raised to 230, and more are planned. There's a lot of work to do, but we're catching up.
So far the best train system in new EU countries has Czech Republic. Regular connections to even the smallest towns, cheap tickets, comfy trains (even if some of them are old motoraks). They didn't neglect their train system like Poland did, they've been slowly but successfully developing it. Czech may not have a HSR, but their country is relatively small and they don't need it at all. Though for all Europe it's basically like this
>>1246858.
