too many consultations and other clowns no doubt...
just get one guy and a map... draw a route.
get guy 2 to check elevation etc.
change route if needed.
prepurchase all property required.
build the damn train track.
It's really not that hard.
how much time was spent wasted looking for hedge hogs or mosquitos. oh no we might destroy a small width of habitat the world will end.
3rd world countries just get it done... we have to grease loads of palms and solicitors
Third world countries often don't give a flying fig about the rights of people, or the environment.
Nor do they usually have to run infrastructure through areas that have potentially thousands/tens of thousands of people living in houses that they've owned for decades and around existing infrastructure that's been in place for a couple of hundred years*, or the same laws regarding forcing people out of their property.
I won't mention that they also don't necessarily build to the same standard, or do the same testing for things that could cause problems....
It's amazing what you can do when you can just send the police (or private security) in to kick people out of their homes without any recourse, and oddly that's fairly close to what happened with some of our early railways and one of the reasons we have the laws we do now.
One of my friends worked on HS2 and one of the time consuming (and costly things) was that they had to do very careful ground surveys along much of the route because it passed over a lot of areas that were known to have either loose soils etc, or that were known to have things like old mine workings IIRC in some areas they were having to do those soil surveys/ground samples every few meters because they knew from previous incidents that there were loads of old tunnels etc often not far underground so you couldn't go "ah it's alright here, I can move 25 meters for the next test" when the tunnels were often only 5-10 meters wide at most and running a high speed train over one without knowing does not usually end well.
They also had to IIRC stop several times due to things like finding archaeological sites so they could be assessed, which is a real problem when you're working on land that has been inhabited and built upon/lived on continuously for a couple of thousand years or more.
*A lot of which might still be in use in the case of things like sewers, water pipes, gas and power, let alone telecoms, and even stuff that was only laid down in the last 25 years often isn't quite where it should be, let alone stuff that was put down 50+ years ago or was put in place by some local group rather than a national authority. I've mentioned it before, but my town had about 3 major power outages in a week due to construction work, they cut through the same cable in about 3 places on 3 different days on the same site.