There is far more to the story than freight companies being uninterested in serving passenger trains. There is also the fact that many of the efficient routes we had a century ago are gone, in some cases even the tracks have been removed; the fact that railroads must compete with heavily subsidized highways and airports; and the fact that we over-regulate passenger rail service (compared to Europe, our trains are much heavier and more expensive to operate). There is also the chronic under-investment in local public transit throughout the country, which makes trains less convenient in the numerous medium-sized cities that exist between major metropolitan areas. Amtrak also inherited "deferred maintenance" at its various stations and on the Northeast Corridor, and they are still trying to dig out of that hole (the fact that their funding is approved annually makes some of the larger projects difficult to plan).