The communities I'm thinking of here never bought locally produced goods for most things. The communities set up along the railroads in the late 1800s never had enough of their own industry to make most things, and a lot of them in the Great Plains never had a climate fit to grow much beyond wheat and cattle. They owed their entire existence to the railroad, and the relatively lucky ones were able to transition to owing their entire existence to a highway when the rail industry bottomed out.
And the majority of towns that aren't near that one stop would falter even faster.
And if you added one stop per town, your rail isn't high-speed anymore.
If you come along with a plan that is going to shutter one of the three remaining businesses where you can buy actual day to day goods, people aren't going to be too thrilled.
How long has it been since these communities actually did that? Small towns can't really support the diversity of industry it takes to buy more local goods than shipped-in goods in a modern-day lifestyle.
The newspaper was produced for the town. Everything else was either services that can't be mass produced or the town was doing their own mass production for export.
A town in the Great Plains doesn't have a climate fit to make most foods locally, unless you call taking shipped-in ingredients and cooking them "making" food.
No. Not in eastern Montana. There are regions where you can't live off the land year-round like you think.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/to-save-a-neighborhood-ban-...