We don’t have fewer railroads than Europe because we’re bad at infrastructure, or obsessive about cars (although being bad at infrastructure is why we have fewer metros).
We have fewer railroads because we are a wealthy enough society to fly.
Why do you people want to move backwards? Why?
This is not a map of all passenger rail in the US, it is a map of all Amtrak rail. There are non-Amtrak passenger trains in the US.
Even these passenger trains run at a loss. Tickets are expensive, times are slow, service is bad, and they run mostly empty. They’re just there because of massive government subsidies, to please the “trains good, cars bad, pretend planes don’t exist,” degrowth lobby.
They’re not empty because cars, they’re empty because planes, which are cheap enough in the US that people can afford to take them, and far faster than rail. And because US cities are generally far enough apart to warrant a plane flight. Europe’s extensive rail network is a product both of Europe being poorer than the US, and also of their cities being significantly closer together.
For context, this is what the US passenger rail network in the US looked like in 1962.
We’ve been closing lines because they’ve become obsolete, not because Americans travel less than Europeans.
Airport security is a nightmare because we deliberately made it a nightmare.
The sort of people lobbying for more rail also lobbied for the TSA. We can either fix that problem for air travel, or implement it for rail just as easily, and for just as much reason.
Are trains any less vulnerable to terrorism, or do we just not bother?
That said, if trains could compete with air travel, people would use them, and we wouldn’t shut them down.
It is broadly true that we shut down a lot of rail that may have worked before implementing the TSA nightmare. But that’s much more easily (and better) solved by abolishing (or even simply reforming) the TSA than it is by reinstituting failed rail lines.
Also, if you fly on off-hours, you can comfortably show up to the airport 45 minutes before your flight, turning your 45-minute flight into a 2.5 hour ordeal.
Counting the trip to the rail station and airport equally, you’re still saving hours, even for relatively close intercity points.