this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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It's funny how you see American movies about the old times and there's always a train around, but in fact it was the people being around the train.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a documentary. Not the toon town stuff. The part about the judge buying the trolley so he could shut it down to build a highway. We used to have a better rail system than anywhere else. Then the car and oil companies bought the tracks and paved over them in the 1920s to 1950s
"Who needs a car in LA? We got the best public transportation system in the world!"
A perfect example of this is the Boston T. It's half the size it was 100 years ago and is still considered the 3rd best transportation network in the country, with a full 50% of all daily commutes to Boston happening on the T.
Although honestly the feuding between the various tram/rail/bus companies contributed to their demise.
Actually, every American town founded before 1950 had a train line going through it. Aside from people living on homesteads, and maybe some small antebellum towns, everybody lived in close distance to a train station before they were shut down and torn up.
Worth noting that this map is for passenger rail only. The cargo rail network is much bigger. Basically, this map shows whereever Amtrak runs, where as before the introduction of massively subsidized interstates in the US in 1956, every cargo rail company also ran profitable passenger rail traffic on a massive network that became today's cargo lines.
The cargo companies dumped their traffic onto the federal government in the 70s and have also ran massive cost cutting programs since, tearing up hundreds of thousands of miles of rail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transportation_in_the_United_States
Another major event in the decline of passenger rail was the elimination of railway post office contracts in 1968 which heavily subsidized passenger transport by also transporting mail
Then the failed merger of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad(second largest bankruptcy in the country to date, only eclipsed by Enron who simply moved numbers in spreadsheets so do they even count?) created a true crisis as suddenly a significant portion of the eastern US could cease to have rail service
On a related but unrelated note, watching Miles in Transit videos where they take intercity buses, its clear that intercity buses are in danger of ceasing to exist, and he advocates for nationalization. Its hard to imagine such a national bus network as anything but an incredible expansion for Amtrak, greatly improving throughway services and likely improving the quality of bus service. Links here and here(timestamp to the retrospective where he advocates for nationalization)
What the US has that Europe doesn't is protected former trackbeds - European governments go around salting the earth after closing a railway so when they want to reopen it in 30 years they either can't or have to spend billions. The US can just reopen it.