It's more that people have started realizing that governments and big tech have been playing this game for a long time, where instead of doing the work of using the huge resources they have to build useful infrastructure with the technolgies that we already have, they prefer to invest in useless new tech, coincidentally being sold by their own cronies. And they often have the nerve to do this while claiming that problems that are solved everywhere else in the world, and have been for 50-100 years, are somehow almost insurmountable.
> Like they feel they have ownership of railways as a concept as sort of a charity case, and if "tech bros" are working on improving them, it's sort of like taking their cause away from them.
The key point here is improving. For example, the doodad the BBC is marketing here is clearly not an improvement, is it? It's much more costly than traditional electrical rail (solar panels are much more expensive to maintain than a pole with a wire), it requires massive new infrastructure (the railway company would have to create a whole solar energy management division), and the only benefit is that it allows the railway company to avoid dealing with the regular electrical grid that powers everything else - for no clear reason.
