Context: Both Japan and the USA meet these criteria.

Japan famously has 0 Series Shinkansen trains that were the fastest at the time of their introduction. The 1975 movie The Bullet Train featured one of these trains in a bomb plot, and the movie was a huge success.

The USA, on the other hand, built the Pioneer Zephyr in 1934. It was the first successful streamliner on American railroads and the first to be powered by diesel engines. It reached an average speed of 124 km/h during its promotional run “dawn to dusk dash” over a 1633 km route from Denver to Chicago, and reached a top speed of 181 km/h. Although not exactly the fastest, the Pioneer Zephyr easily qualified as one of the fastest trains in regular passenger service at that time.

The 1934 movie The Silver Streak featured the design and building of a fictional train based on the Pioneer Zephyr, and how the characters utilized its speed to deliver life-saving equipment in time.

The point of this meme is that railway and related pop culture in Japan is quite well known, but even many Americans are not very aware of their achievements back in the day due to the sorry status of Amtrak.