It's true that it's contingent on a carbon-free source of hydrogen. But if something like thermochemical hydrogen production through nuclear [1] or solar takes off, hydrogen fuel represents an energy-dense fuel that could be used in lieu of fossil fuels in many applications.
1. https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/gc/gc57inf-2-att1_e...
Don't most countries already use these? World wide, a third of all rails is electrified in some way, and for long-distance rail, that's bound to be overhead.
Most European rail is electrified. So hydrogen or any other diesel replacement is only relevant for very rural, very sparsely used lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran... claims to include both passenger and non-passenger networks.
In the US, the east coast line is electrified from Boston to DC (possibly further? Can't remember.)
Europe's lines are economical to electrify because of greater density. Electrifying a rail line costs the same regardless of how many trains use it, so it breaks even in dense and frequently traveled routes but not on sparse lines. Guess which is more common in a less densely populated continent like North America?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_electrification_in_th....
Especially if hydrogen becomes very cheap through something like generation through waste-heat from nuclear power plants, hydrogen propulsion may make more sense.
1. https://www.freightwaves.com/news/is-electrifying-the-freigh...
The study you quote is for southern california so that probably is on the high end of an estimate. Probably a different budget for West Virginia.
In other news, one of the maintenance roads for the Golden Gate Bridge was recently completed. Adjusted for inflation, it cost more and took
longer than the bridge itself. If I remember right, one of the bus stops in SF also cost more than the Golden Gate Bridge.
Yeah building dozens of large scale hydrogen plants, trenching and welding pipelines, building massive excess of necessary renewable energy, figuring distribution networks, deciding storage & container standards, house retrofits etc to run our society will be much easier than ...(checks notes)... Hanging wires
That addresses all your concerns, except maybe that people will want to produce hydrogen at home from their own solar arrays. That's expensive, but arguably unnecessary, since the hydrogen would mostly just be used to power cars.
How about looking at the facts first?
> All high speed lines in Germany (ICE)
I suppose almost all:
https://www.bahnausbau-nordostbayern.de/files/img/Bahnstrom/...
It seems to be a lot more concentrated on the worse side of the rhine river. ;)