This is a strawman argument.

In Europe university students travel hundereds if not thousands of kilometers to do exchange which can be done by train and many actually do. This is usually the most suitable and most likely time for someone to travel really long distances.

There are also those things called planes which many trains have an express line to.

Even medium speed rail enable people to commute distances like 80 km (50 mi) under 40 minutes, ~30 times each day. There are people who are doing that in my company.

Emissions for driving ICE vs flying in a plane are very similar, don't fly.

Sounds nice! But of course not necessary when you have high speed rail.

High-speed rail can't stop too often, so all the towns in between stops and far from that line would have to be served by low speed rail, running a few times a day at most.

As everywhere - there's a tradeoff between efficiency and latency. Sometimes it's not worth going all in with efficiency.

Okay, so 20mi of where you were born and the four other places easily accessible by rail. It just wouldn’t work in rural, spread out America.

(Anyway, if we cave to this demand, getting rid of trains will be next on the docket. Remember when the green folks were all about EVs, until they started happening? And now it’s “no personal transportation”?)

Rail for long-distance travel

It never even occurred to me that dying on the antipode of my birthplace would be a goal of mine. Different strokes and all that I suppose.