No, but the early railroads of this country were built when there were no property rights of competing owners to defend (or respect), few comparable alternative modes of transportation, and practically no safety or regulatory measures to govern how it was built.

That said, the cost of building things in the US is a major problem.

> Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR?

Heh, I don't know much about the history of the transcontinental railroad in the US, but up here in Canada it was relatively cheap because... well... to be blunt, we used primarily Chinese labour and did not give a single crap about whether or not they died building it.

The US government gave railroad companies 175 million acres of free land, 10% of the nation (ex. Alaska), to get those railroads built. It was an incredibly costly endeavor.