There is a disconnect here with you replying to someone who was talking about the ideal, with your reality. No one is saying train systems in a lot of places, right now, are perfect. We can make them more perfect in addition to moving more freight onto rail, doing more last-mile deliveries on e-cargo bikes, and making it reasonable for people to replace more or most of their sub-5km car trips with a bicycle. Not only is that possible, but it's necessary to approach that ideal.
Their ideal is my reality, because I've never owned a vehicle with more than two wheels and live in a country whose rail density and usage is arguably exceeded only by Japan. So I think I'm pretty well placed to comment on the impracticality of most people forgoing the use of cars altogether in favour of ebikes and rail.
If you don't have any answers to points like trains being unsuited to carrying luggage, rail schedules being suboptimal for individual journeys outside peak use zones and times and most places not being close to a station even with a rail network as dense as the UK's, please don't resort to strawmanning it as "trains are bad" and insisting that everything I said about rail logistics boils down to British Rail[1] management...
I'm all in favour of people walking and cycling more and getting trains when that makes sense, but that isn't going to result in many of them not needing cars (and associated batteries) for other journeys.
[1]an organization with this name was wound up in 1997 and replaced with a succession of franchises - many with exprience running rail networks overseas - awarded by competitive tender. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, changing the management wasn't a panacea...
His experience in the UK seems like it would be relevant to most people in the US, and I assume Canada and Australia also. You can't sell this to people on just your terms, you have speak to them on their terms, too.
I agree with what you said that the problem needs to be attacked on multiple fronts (public transport, mining, zoning, doubling grid capacity, current subsidies and special interest groups, etc).
I assume we'll get there, but it's going to take a while, likely more than a couple decades to make a huge dent in countries with a lot of car-dependency.
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. The odds of the US or Britain improving their rail systems in order for them to be more efficient/usable are vanishingly slim, to the point that we should likely bake their crappy nature into our assumptions of requirements.
We can't even figure out how (here in the US) to build subway tunnels as cheaply as ones in Europe, if I recall right. I am very skeptical that we will ever manage to approach the ideal here, for a variety of reasons (suburban / car-centric lifecycle being so deeply embedded here, etc) which I don't think can be addressed by science. It seems like an economic problem, where paying to rebuild everything is so expensive that no one will do it in the short term, even if the long term gains could be great.
It's a matter of time: the political polar-opposite states of Texas and California are both working on high-speed rail projects, though they are rather unambitious in scope.
I'm curious if the dysfunction of British Rail is also related to the patchwork privatization like it is in the US. Is that still a thing? last I read, parts of the network - and/or trains - were owned or operated by a Virgin subsidiary.
Patchwork privatization hasn't helped matters and allows some companies to extract a bit of monopoly profit from a subsidised industry (the infrastructure remains nationalised, franchises are awarded to private companies for running rolling stock in certain regions routes for fixed terms, some companies were really struggling and had their franchises taken over the government and there are other quirks of the franchising system like franchises being required to lease rather than own trains and some services being mandatory to run, and prices are regulated).
But the root cause is that running rail networks is a hard problem: demand fluctuates from hour to hour and decade to decade more than the infrastructure can, optimisations for network efficiency aren't necessarily going to align with individual passengers' demands, when stuff breaks down a well-used part of the network gets cascading problems, governments have lots of other things crying out for more subsidies (and a purely for-profit network would be smaller and thinner). The UK also has older than average infrastructure and very expensive and occupied land right where new lines are most needed, although other countries are cursed with geography which is more challenging in many other ways
Slight correction. Renationalised, rather than remains nationalised.
The infrastructure was renationalised, because Railtrack preferred handing out dividends over maintaining tracks, eventually leading to a derailment that killed 4 people and injured 70, and led to trains being restricted to 20MPH across the country for months afterwards, because they had no idea how fucked any of the rest of the rails were.
There are certain things train services are excellent at, like serving people's daily commute at predictable times into a congested city centre (with the caveat crowded trains aren't necessarily a pleasant experience) and letting you travel whilst drunk or putting the finishing touches to your presentation, but they're not going to eliminate many of the most common uses for cars.