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Welcome to the Forum, Arkadas, and I'm sure you'll quickly learn a lot just reading the posts here. This Forum is primarily a UK one but the railways of Europe are perhaps not so unlike our own, except for the fragmentation that privatisation has imposed on our railway system.
Just to get you going with at least some "bullet points" under each heading, I started to think of the following:
Challenges:
seemingly ever-increasing regulations and cost of running the railway;
a complex and labour intensive industry;
competition from low-cost airlines;
inability to squeeze much more time-saving out of already long sections of high-speed line;
difficulty and cost of building new lines in heavily built-up parts of western Europe.
Risks:
fare increases to fund investment drive passengers off the railway;
ditto fare increases to compensate for decrease in government subsidies;
unwillingness of taxpayers to continue current level of subsidies;
some railways rely on a small number of business travellers to generate a large proportion of their income;
as seen over recent decades, the difficulties of getting traffic back once it's lost to the railway;
a large percentage of the population has never travelled by train and doesn't see it as an attractive form of transport.
Opportunities:
journey time can be unbeatable between city centres up to a couple of hundred miles;
sustainability - carbon emissions lower than most other forms of transport;
electrified lines can have their power generated by many sources of fuel;
an extremely safe form of high-speed transport;
work environment (for business travel) and comfort can be difficult to equal in other forms of transport;
national networks can easily be interconnected in continental Europe (and the UK via Channel Tunnel).
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