But actually Britain had leaned in hard to the railways, by undertaking a large modernisation scheme [1]. The problem is, they did it a bit too early, in the 1950s, when electricity seemed like a risky bet so they stuck with steam which was the UK's core strength.
Of course, that turned out to be a mistake in retrospect. In the 1960s, investing in the railways in any form at all would've seemed like making the same sort of mistake as just a few years ago.
One interesting analysis I saw about the Beeching cuts said that the worse sin is that they did not preserve rights of way i.e. when closing a line they should have built a road and run a bus service (as Beeching's report recommended) or at least preserved it for potential rail reopening, but in many cases they sold the land off to developers so the chance was lost.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1955_Modernisat...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ian+hislop+off+...
From a practical/political standpoint, it'll be interesting to see the backlash when a railroad attempts to start exercising its right to reclaim some of these properties, which are largely and falsely believed to have become community property.
Germany is just as bad. Between 1994 (the begin of the privatization) and now we lost 6.200km of rail infrastructure [1] - something like 15-ish percent.
My s/o and I went on a two week railroad trip through the whole of Germany. Seeing rotting or half-ass dismantled rails, former shift yards and smashed-in former other infrastructure just hurted to watch. Everything has gone downhill, there was barely any investment in upkeep of tracks and buildings, only in new construction of expensive billions-euros high speed rail... the reason is simple: DB Netz, the privatized infrastructure operator, has to pay for upkeep on their own (from usage fees) while the federal and state governments (and in some cases like the Munich S-Bahn also the counties and cities) pay for all the high-profile projects.
We had so, so many industrial areas served by rail as well: in 1994, over 11.000 companies and industrial zones had their own railway attachment - today, it's barely 2.300, a reduction of 80% [2]. No wonder our highways and side roads are overcrowded with trucks. The reason for that is that unlike the US, Europe still has chain-link and buffer couplers, which means shunting yards are extremely staff-intensive to run, and shunting from and to the industrial areas is expensive as well... which means that, thanks to privatization, DB Cargo was more or less forced to shut down the industrial zone supply because the absurd losses this branch brought in could no longer be cross-subsidized by passenger rail.
[1] https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/themen/infrastruktur/schi...
[2] https://www.rnd.de/wirtschaft/gueterverkehr-auf-die-schiene-...
In the UK it was somewhere around 25% of rail lines and 55% of stations. Complete short-sightedness.
There was definitely mistakes (Pennines) but overall most of the lines would have had to be closed at some point. They often connected tiny towns/villages by circuitous routes, often with stations ages from the actual place they were meant to be serving.
It makes you wonder what the country would be like if we'd leaned into the rail system instead of tearing up a chunck of it following the Beaching Report. The most interesting ones for me are the additional lines that crossed the Pennines, linking the north together much better than it is today.