I'm mostly trying to refer to the unprofitable parts of the remaining rail network: the "rollover country" and lost connections, the towns built for rail that rail long since abandoned. I'm also explicitly not talking about long distances, but all the many medium distances where train travel makes the most sense on a continent and has almost entirely disappeared in America with rare exceptions on the coasts.

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.

4-5 hours is probably just about the upper limit for viable high traffic passenger rail. Even on the Northeast Corridor (where Amtrak makes the money that the rest of their route system loses), NY to the north and NY to the south are popular. Boston all the way to DC much less so.

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.

My original point remains there are a lot of routes I'm jealous of that used to have less than or equal to 4-5 hour travel that were shut down and can't even be done at those speeds today. I'm not talking about new rail lines, I'm talking about all the existing rail lines that are underutilized by the existing cargo-focused train companies today because they aren't profitable for cargo, but could be useful for passenger travel given the old/original speeds, which we can't get today given the catch-22 of there is no demand there because the speeds aren't there and the speeds aren't there because the demand isn't there at the current speeds.

«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.