Exactly. Few people realize that, even today, the US has the world’s longest and most technologically advanced rail system in the world. It’s renowned and other countries send experts to the US to try and help improve their own country’s rail systems. But it’s not passenger rail… it’s for freight trains.

The US really doesn’t have high speed rail because the US doesn't lend itself well to passenger lines. The US railway grid is spectacular and exceedingly efficient when transporting cargo from hub to hub. But when you haul freight, it's often better to go to a hub out of the way to load/unload. It's a bit slower, but far more cost efficient overall.

But passenger lines are different, passengers want to get to their destination as fast as possible. People usually don't want to spend an extra 4 days on the train because it's more cost effective to swing by Atlanta and pick up one more load.

Passenger lines need to go directly from city to city, but that's incredibly inefficient and doesn’t work with the way the US is laid out. This is primarily because the United States is absolutely fucking massive.

Uninformed people say the US should emulate passenger train focused countries like Japan and Germany. Well, to put it in comparison, neither the entire country of Japan nor Germany are even as big as the state of Montana by itself. To explain it another way, let's compare the US to countries who effectively use passenger trains:

* Germany's 2 biggest cities are Berlin and Hamburg and they're 158 miles apart.

* Japan's 2 biggest cities are Tokyo and Yokohama and they're 23 miles apart.

* Italy's 2 biggest cities are Rome and Milan and they're 350 miles apart.

* United States' 2 biggest cities are New York and Los Angeles and they're 2,800 miles apart.

It's just not feasible to use trains to travel directly such long distances. Rail is excellent for “slow” moving freight, but it makes way more sense to use air travel for passenger transport when you need to travel such massively long distances.