As for getting passenger rail back up to its original speed, I'd have to be convinced that (modulo the delays that can occur due to sharing rails with freight) that it's a lot slower than it once was. For example, the Twentieth Century from NY to Chicago took about 16 hours (per the song) and takes about the same length of time today.
How many people are going to take a 16 hour train from NY to Chicago when they can fly in a few hours? Maybe you and/or a few others who will do it now and then for the experience, but pretty much none of the business travelers who are the bread and butter of most routes would. Heck, cut it to 8 hours and, still, very few would take it.
The rail service was never all that fast over long distances. There just weren't any reasonable alternatives.
ADD: This isn't unique to the US BTW. I've looked at European routes like Dusseldorf to Paris and it turned out it made far more sense to fly.
For an example, used to be you could take a train from Louisville, KY to Chicago in about five hours. It takes six to eight to drive there in today's traffic. The last time Amtrak tried to run that route it took eight to ten hours between the slow down in the tracks being in such disarray and the outright antipathy from the cargo companies to passenger travel and disincentive by the cargo companies to speed up their own rails because that route between Chicago and Louisville at this point is much more "roll through" than "drop off" these days from the cargo perspective.
(Sure, you can fly Louisville to Chicago in an hour and half, two hours, but a five hour train ride would still be competitive even/especially for business travel. An eight/ten hour train ride clearly was not.)
That's just the example off the top of my head. Louisville is a major US city with zero (!) current passenger routes. When Louisville deals with the city's rail infrastructure from a community safety standpoint (much less any other potential need), the involved companies such as CSX whine and complain that they are broke and can't possibly invest in the rail infrastructure they supposedly "own".
We refer to the founders of the American Rail system as Robber Barons for many reasons, but they certainly did a good job of robbing from the system's own future as well.
For better or worse, there just isn't a lot of appetite in the US for creating new rail lines that would be money losers.
>We refer to the founders of the American Rail system as Robber Barons for many reasons, but they certainly did a good job of robbing from the system's own future as well.
Not sure what you mean by that. They built much of the rail network. It declined after WWII (i.e. long after the so-called "robber barons") because the interstates and flying took away much of the passenger traffic and made it unprofitable.
«It declined after WWII (i.e. long after the so-called "robber barons") because the interstates and flying took away much of the passenger traffic and made it unprofitable.»
I'm trying to point out it also declined because the inheritors of Robber Barons focused on the comfortable and easy profits of coast-to-coast cargo over long term investments in infrastructure. Yes, interstates and advances in flight did their part to minimize the public interest in passenger traffic, but so too did giving priority of all lines to cargo and avoiding long term capital maintenance and improvements. The railroad industry has a lot of "tech debt" that they've passed on from generation to generation and it's past time someone went in and refactored that debt. Yes, some of that tech debt is the fault of the Robber Barons themselves in that the majority of what they built (using public right of ways and public eminent domain to help construct it in a very strong example of America mistaking public infrastructure as private corporate profit centers) was never built with long term maintenance and sustainability in mind.