Very american! BTW, do these trucks transfer people? In vertical or horizontal stacks? I jest! Please do not take offense. My initial post was about americann-nes of the thing and about personal transport, not the trucking hauling and other heavy weight transporting. Which trains are good at as well
1: We need more rail. 2: We esp need rail to nodes in the interior, but 3: The population density is such that most people will not be well served, because McAlester OK, (pop 18,000) is not going to generate enough traffic, on it’s own, to justify having regular local rail.
And the surrounding couple of hundred square miles don’t have more than another 18,000 people, all in. And that’s the case for most of the US interior.
Because the population is 500-20,000 people towns… and they are 40-50 miles between them. With a very evenly distributed family unit every 2-5 miles in all the rest of the space.
Cheyenne Wyoming has a population about the size of Edinburgh, Scotland; 11 percent of which are all in Cheyenne. The rest are spread about the rest of the state in a fairly even distribution.
Even if 20 percent of them want to travel, they will have to get several hundred miles to Cheyenne, to get a train to another train; and then get back to home again when they get home again.
There are less than 600,000 people in Wyoming, 40 million in Ukraine.
That is precisely the point. Population density, and area, make effective, efficient, rail very much harder to implement, maintain, and use.
So rail might be worth it, for longer trips, but for things less than a couple of days drive away, the inconvenience factor will militate against the cultural shift which would make driving unreasonable.
Not least because the time at the start end; and cost of getting to/from the station aren’t trivial.
Could the US have functional train which supplants automobiles? Yes, for most of the population (which lives in the 50 miles of the coast/southern border), but for the vast majority of the vast area, it’s a much more expensive, and labor intensive (because the trains have to run, all the time) thing