The big thing that killed passenger rail in America was the US Postal Service ending it’s contracts with railroads for mail services. Before that they paid a significant sum to railroads to run an RPO (railroad post office) on the trains to sort and deliver mail along the line. Simply running an RPO would be net enough income to keep woefully underutilized passenger services profitable. RPO service ended in 1978 but was in decline before then due to shifting the sorting and transport to sorting facilities and trucks respectively
The deregulation was kind of inevitable. It was a bad time for railroads before it and it was a slightly less bad time for railroads after it.
I strongly suspect that in the long run the solution will be to nationalize the rails and signaling then license private companies to run on them
Except now train travel is a joke and building out high-speed rail is nearly impossible
The big thing that killed passenger rail in America was the US Postal Service ending it’s contracts with railroads for mail services. Before that they paid a significant sum to railroads to run an RPO (railroad post office) on the trains to sort and deliver mail along the line. Simply running an RPO would be net enough income to keep woefully underutilized passenger services profitable. RPO service ended in 1978 but was in decline before then due to shifting the sorting and transport to sorting facilities and trucks respectively