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.
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
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.