I think that puts the cart before the horse. Why build a railroad to no-where? Surely the small towns pre-existed the railroad.

The two end stations existed, and enough in between the make the railway feasible. Then the existence of paths to two big cities made some villages grow, and grow, and grow.

the two end stations exist because people were already there, they didn't build that railway across the US before these areas were settled.

What you're arguing is that there are towns that would pop up around these railways after the fact, and while that's true, they would also pop up around water, gold, and other natural resources.

It turns out there's lots of reasons why communities form, but one thing we know for sure is that railways require demand FIRST, not second.

The USA has several many towns and cities which were built because of railways.

Railways induce demand, both for work for the railway (moving trains, moving goods between trains, services for passengers), and for the excellent transport connections they provide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_towns_in_the_U...

please re-read my post, you misunderstood it.

Some demand has to be present first, sure. But "not second" doesn't follow. No law prevents the planners from expecting demand to grow, and basing their decision to build on that.

yeah, because second doesn't necessarily come after first!

From one big town on a navigable waterway to another big town on a navigable waterway. The small towns in the middle came later.

Exactly! People say, "rural communities need cars". And sure, new sprawl does need cars, like whatever shat itself over the Front Range. But a lot of old towns had trains. Or stage coaches. Or, later, busses. You see this all over the Old West, and New England, and the Rust Belt. These little towns grew up before there were cars.

You still see this in rural Europe. There will be some little village in the middle of nowhere. But the shops and (now I'm picturing the north of England) a pub will all be in a cluster, and there are country lanes that you can actually walk on, and in that village center there's a bus stop, from which you can get to Carlisle or Newcastle and thence to Durham, or wherever.

Some developing countries too actually. You couldn't backpack around these places if they didn't have busses. The "third world" is often a better place to be a pedestrian than America is. Because everybody else is a pedestrian too.

America's problem is that all the private investment in railroads has been displaced by public investment in highways. It's Eisenhower's fault. It makes sense that the US would invest in dual use technologies for mechanized warfare, but it sucks to have to live with.

And now -- I like bike paths, but -- rails-to-trails efforts are just an admission of defeat. But they're what we're getting instead now.

> These little towns grew up before there were cars.

they used horses...

I think it's hilarious how people are trying to argue that a single train stop in a town is somehow public transportation for the citizens of that town to get around said town.

It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Your comment reminds me of this cartoon: https://i.imgur.com/aVpP0t6.png

It's interesting how quickly we forget about how things used to be. My grandparents were subsistence farmers in my lifetime, and they did not use horses to get around town. I don't think they ever owned a horse.

For regular everyday travel, they walked.

They'd sometimes need to go work out in a field. On those days, they'd hitch up the cows to the wagon and spend the day working there. This is a slow process, so they'd need to have enough work to spend the whole day there.

Horses were never a transportation method, except for the extremely rich. They were agricultural tools. Looking at France, because data is easy to get there, the population of France was about 40 million in 1900[2]. Around that time, France also had about 3 million horses, or about a horse for every 13 people. Of these 3 million horses, 2.5 million were "draft horses" used for pulling plows.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-horse-p... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Histori...

oh yeah, that's why saddle's weren't invented.

Autonomous vehicles will obsolete passenger rail. The highway network is expansive, interconnected, and hyper-local in a way that railways can never reproduce. Rapid transit in EVs is conceivable in the near future as Autonomy takes over more safety critical processes. As safety critical processes are automated the speed limits can be lifted, allowing very inexpensive travel on-demand.

is this a serious response?

before they had cars people used horses.