Great points about public vs private owned networks, private competition at “higher layers in the stack” of a publicly owned network, and building a durable political coalition around that. I’ve been on this train as it were for many years, but building that durable political coalition is a really difficult thing.

In the US, rail is the only form of transportation that mostly privately owned. Whereas the other forms of transportation infrastructure are publicly owned and maintained as a common good: roads, airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC), and maritime infrastructure (seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS)). Ideally the US should do the same for its rail infrastructure. This is what Europe is pursuing, publicly owning and investing the infrastructure, and allowing multiple competitors to operate on top.

Much the American political hostility to rail stems the monopolistic practices of privately owned railroads. Central Pacific, which built the Western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, was founded by the Big 4, which included Leland Stanford, Governor and US Senator in the early days of California statehood, and of course founder of the University. They merged with another railroad they owned in Southern Pacific, later referred to as The Octopus, with tentacles that reached to every corner of the state and dominated California transportation and politics.

The solution to this problem is to bring the railroads under public ownership, not destroy the railroad with subsidized competition from public roads. The consequences of this have been enormous. The US once had over 300,000 route miles of railroad at its peak. Today it has ~147,000 route miles, less than half of its peak. The US National Highway System is ~160,000 route miles by comparison. Many communities lost rail service entirely. Even a rural agricultural state like Iowa, almost 90% farmland, was completely criss-crossed by railroads to an extent that no location in the state was more than 12 miles from a rail line. Today only a fraction of that rail network survives.

It is hard imagine something like this happening to other forms of publicly owned transportation infrastructure, because of that durable political coalition. People would not accept half of all roads or airports being abandoned because they are not nominally profitable. It is considered a common good provided for by the state.