>Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of Europe.

those parts of Europe, let's not forget, were rather thoroughly flattened to a wet paste about 80 years ago, and were rebuilt with nice, straight, quick rail lines by people who knew how fast trains that weren't built in 1840 could go.

I think you overestimate the extent to which the war ravaged the countryside. Some cities were destroyed. Most (most!) of the rest of Europe, the towns and villages, wasn't.

It's the cities (and their suburbs) where acquiring new ROW is expensive.

For the most part, the cities in France that could fairly be said to have been 'flattened' during WWII were in Normandy. Paris was scarcely touched. Yet they have a high-speed rail network covering the whole country. Spain was untouched by WWII, yet they have a high-speed rail network. The U.S. somehow managed to build an interstate highway system through every major city in the decades after WWII without being bombed flat. The WWII argument seems weak.

> The U.S. somehow managed to build an interstate highway system through every major city in the decades after WWII without being bombed flat.

The U.S. has essentially stopped building urban interstates since the late 70's, when opposition from residents became too strong to ignore. I don't foresee this changing in the near future.

My understanding is that construction costs in Europe are rising as well due to (among other things) increased use of tunnels in urban area due to opposition from residents.

I'd say that the Western cities were barely touched. When compared to the destruction along the Eastern Front.

LGV operation started in 1981, long after any WWII reconstruction would've wrapped up with several decades of interim land development.

Yeah, I don't buy this either. China builds thousands of kilometers of new high speed rail every year.

Are they doing so by offering the existing landowners a fair market value for their properties?

To a surprising extent, yes.

I know the popular Western image of infrastructure development in China is jackbooted thugs forcing farmers off their land, and there's some of that as well, but most people are reasonably happy with the compensation they get. The Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev project (below) is also an instructive case study of an ambitious rail project that was cancelled largely thanks to (sadly unwarranted) public concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai%E2%80%93Hangzhou_magl...