Reminds me of my home city where people argued that there was no way to incorporate urban rail into the city, but luckily the town is crisscrossed by bike trails. The bike trails were literally the rail bed from our urban train system that got torn out in the 50s.

It was so widespread that I've never been to a small town, in the region I grew up in, that didn't have an old passenger rail station that was repurposed into something else. Your map starts well into the 1900s, my area started being built up hundreds of years before that. Shit my house is almost 100 years older, alone.

My current small town has THREE, ffs, but no, this rail can only be used for freight, because reasons

Another one I found:

Apparently this is a weak point for Europe, and even other rail systems like China's. The US has a relatively efficient cargo rail network, while more stuff is shipped across the EU in trucks than it probably should be.

I feel like many people oppose rails to trails because then there’s much less of a chance it will become rails again, so you have to let go of the hope of any sort of trains coming back. Though becoming a trail is certainly a lot better than the track land being split up and sold off to developers, since then there’s no chance.

I once heard of someone who had to go from somewhere in the south of England to London, and took a plane to Berlin and another to London because it was cheaper than the train.

I don't understand why plane tickets are so cheap compared to plane tickets. Part of it is that plane fuel isn't allowed to be taxed while other forms of energy are, but there's got to be more. The situation is insane.

Anyway, let's at least tax plane fuel.

The most ridiculous situation I came across was getting the train from Biarritz in France to Bilbao in Spain and back. I heard the phrase "It's another country" uttered in both French and Spanish - turns out they really hate each other! We had to walk a few minutes from France across the border to another station in Spain.

Have you seen how empty Texas is? And how flat it is? It's kinda ideal train territory. If Norway and Switzerland can set up train routes, the Great Plains certainly can.

Cities in the US are far apart because of car-centric design, not the other way around. If we just invested more in other forms of transit, then our cities would not be so sprawling.

Why not, if it's the same distance?

At the risk of feeding a troll, they really aren’t. Sweet spot for high speed rail is generally considered two cities 300-500 miles apart. That covers most of the US population

I think it's only Amtrak, the main Intercity passenger rail service. There's a ton more freight rail, and hundreds of smaller regional rail services.

Looks pretty similar to that amtrak map shown on Wikipedia

It’s worse than that, because it doesn’t show service level. The northeast corridor (Boston—>nyc—>dc) have great train frequency (even then they need to run more trains on holidays).

I believe the long distance routes are like one train per day. You’d have to be really dedicated or really desperate to deal with such slow unreliable trains which such low frequency. I do believe they’re there only to preserve track and collect votes rather than be useful. At this rate maybe in another century ….

The biggest difference between the United States and Europe is their respective population densities. Trains are less of a convenience and more of necessity. If everyone had a vehicle, it would be nearly impossible just to drive down the road.