It was 50 years ago this month the Bullet train in Japan started service.In terms of external aesthetics I think they got it right the first time.
makes me feel old. i graduated high school in 1966. 50 years ago i was 16. america, the railroad companies, most of them, were doing everything they could to discourage and get rid of passenger service. eventually we realized, that if we were going to continue to have rail passenger service at all, we would have to implement some sort of national compromise. that we would have to wake up and accept that not everything can be successfully profit driven. the development of high speed rail, only became possible, in places where transportation infrastructure, was treated as a public service, owned by everybody, not, for profit, corporate concerns.
In the UK when British Rail introduced the Deltics in 1955 on the east coast line with new carriages, the journey time was reduced, people started using the service again and BR made a profit on the route. When the Deltics were superseded by the HST's in 1979 more people started using the service.