Railways are an excellent mode of travel. They are significantly more efficient than cars in all ways that matter: cost, space, energy.

Nobody looks at the billions spent on roads and thinks "ooh these are unprofitable let's get rid of them", so why do people/governments constantly do that for rail?

The reasoning people use to justify the spending on roads is that the economic value people and goods transported on said roads outweighs the costs of building and maintaining them. Trains are more efficent than cars on this simply bu economics of scale: one long tube with metal wheels carrying 2000 people into the city moves a lot more than a freeway of the same area.