> And you could certainly make the same argument about airliners, which have a death rate <10% that of trains (and <1% that of cars).

You can, but it's not a fair comparison. 99.9% of deaths of railroad transport is people killed while crossing rails - e.g. pedestrians.

If you consider rail passengers only, it is far lower than airlines and cars, something on the scale of 2-3 people/year.

Airplanes are cheating in the sense that there are no pedestrians in the air to collide with.