If your train stops for every 3 person village, it’ll never get anywhere so a car is way faster. If you build lines from all the outlying villages to the small towns that have grocery stores, you can kiss pensions, healthcare and education goodbye as those systems are already barely sustainable.

We need to colonize someone so we can get wealthy off their backs like western nations, or force lower wages to create economic incentives to use us as a dumping ground for money like China. Unfortunately we lack the population for either option.

There are also places where the train connection is already there but it’s about 300 km of rail to get to a town 80 km away from you because apparently trains aren’t great in swamps so you go through the capital which is the only place big enough to warrant multiple routes going to it so it serves as the de facto hub.

I think if everyone pitched in about 100k eur in additional taxation, we could connect all the towns. National median income of course is about 2k a month pre-tax.