I think we need to have a concept of essential rail service, like we have with road and air.
These routes should have have any obligation to make money, because they provide a benefit to tax payers. Most infrastructure is just accepted as something that should be funded.
Another reason these long distance routes should be left intact is because they are an important anchor for eventually expanding to high speed rail.
China kept their unprofitable rural slow passenger routes into the distant corners of their country, and now they are converting them to high speed.
See last page of the FY 2019 annual report (Amtrak's FY 2019 ended on Sep. 30, 2019; aka pre-pandemic): https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
In the US, at the federal level at least, rail has a serious popularity problem which makes it politically difficult to sustain. That problem is largely driven by the fact that outside of the northeast our rail service is a joke.
If we want to have good quality rail across the country — which I would like to have, fwiw — I think we’d get there faster by focusing on serving just a few places with very high quality rail that everyone else would actually want. Then we could gradually expand the system with concentrated investments that hit that quality bar. After a generation of that, we could have broadly popular rail with a high quality of service. Perhaps that could even include highly subsidized service to rural areas, in the same way we have intensely subsidized highway and postal services to such places today.
But I think if we want to get there we need to start with a smaller goal of regional networks that are GOOD, so that people’s perception of rail changes.