Comment by AnthonyMouse

> On the other hand, maybe if the railways weren’t broken up the USA might have been crisscrossed with high speed rail by now.

Eh. The rails themselves are a natural monopoly in the same way roads are. It's one of the few things it makes sense to have the government build, or at least contract to have someone build, and then provide to everyone without restriction.

Meanwhile train cars and freight hauling and passenger service aren't any more of a natural monopoly than taxis or trucks. They get monopolized if someone is allowed to leverage a monopoly over the tracks into a monopoly over the rest of it, but that's unnecessary and undesirable. Separating them out allows the market that can be competitive to be competitive. Which is the same reason you don't want a tech monopoly leveraging it into control over ancillary markets that could otherwise be competitive.

There are two main reasons train service in the US is a shambles. The first is that the population density is too low, especially in the west. How many people do you expect to be riding a train from Boise to Des Moines on a regular basis? And the second is that truck drivers don't like freight rail, car companies don't like passenger rail and oil companies don't like either one, and they all lobby against anything that would make it better in the parts of the country where it could actually work. It's hard to make something good when there are millions of voters and billions of dollars trying to get it to suck.