Rails work very well in situations were you have high density living areas connected to high density working areas and everybody needs to get from the same point A to the same point B very often.
There is only a few places in the USA were such situations exist and they generally already have railways for people to use.
There was once a time were the USA had useful network of trains that people could actually use to get where they wanted to go, but the Federal government flushed that down the toilet in the first half of the 20th century in the name of "improving efficiency".
Pretty much every town, big or small, in the USA that was started before train going through the heart of it. If it didn't have a way to get there by rail there was no real point in building it.
But that hasn't been true for a long long time.
The idea being that large numbers of privately owned railways with small depots all over the place wasteful use of resources. It was much better to regulate and consolidate to remove the redundancies. They used to be proud about all the different depots and stops that were being destroyed and railway spurs that were being shutdown because they thought that it would reduce costs and economize the railway network.
The end result of all of this was the Interstate highway system.
Rail isn't going to come back.