Comment by jazzyjackson
2 days ago
Land was granted to the railroads with the agreement that they would run passenger rail services. When passenger rail became so unprofitable that it was bankrupting rail companies, they lobbied to make it the governments responsibility to move people around and leave them to make money shuffling freight.
It was kind of a mixed bag.
Part of the way this worked was that USPS was actually paying for a lot of the rail services to deliver mail (which is also what the government wanted more so than passenger rail service.) The moment USPS pulled contracts in favor of long-distance airmail the whole model went belly-up.
And long distance airmail subsidized a lot of early flight as well.
Most rails were not land grant. Those were what you read about in history, but most had to buy their own land. Land grant mostly was for places where today almost nobody lives and even less back then.
The rails across the (very roughly) Southwest are some of the most famous, but the real activity was all on the East.