Not only.
One problem we have with the US rail infrastructure is, it's hard to move...to relocate.
Plant goes up - during WWII. Major steel mill. The site CHOSEN was chosen because it was half a mile from a rail yard and on a trunk line.
For, say, the Delaware Lackawanna & Western railway.
Time moves on. Steelworker unions get militant - and the company that owns the mills is sold to a multinational Globalist concern. It has steel mills in Belgium, mills in India...and in the US.
There is a major difference between operating a plant and BLEEDING it. That is what happens here. Capital improvement stops. Maintenance is limited to what cannot be deferred. Meantime, the smirking lower-management gives the union goons all they demand. HOORAY!
AND....the DL&W railroad is merged; and then the Erie-Lackawanna bankrupted, forced into a much larger corporate ownership, Conrail. And in the course of a decade, the DL&W lines are ripped out. The plant has to either maintain an access industrial spur, or ship by truck.
Meantime, a new technology - mini-mills, with electric furnaces. Going up everywhere. The old mill cannot be revamped.
The owning company, a subsidiary of Big Global Steel, is bankrupted. And all the rail lines, including the ones that remained and connected to the industrial spur...are now "not cost effective." And are abandoned.
Building new rail lines to the new mini-mills is often not possible - over a million dollars a mile, AFTER the land is bought. So Big Rail just cedes that business.
If any of this sounds familiar, it should. I just described the last years of Bethlehem Steel's Lackawanna plant, their last.
The same applies to streetcars/LRT. The fashionable, desirable neighborhoods NOW, are likely to be filled with hominoid dross in 20 years. God, I've seen THIS - both in Cleveland and Houston.
In Cleveland, the city built the Red Line heavy-rail commuter line, electrified, to take the place of the Cleveland Streetcar Company, when it closed in 1950. It ran from the Windermere neighborhood in East Cleveland, to the West Park neighborhood, with plans to extend to the airport.
It did make the airport. But no one living in Windermere goes to the airport, except to work as a custodian or porter.
And no airline passengers would take the dangerous trip. Anyway, they come from far outside Cleveland.
There is not the money to re-route the rail system. GCRTA did explore buying the old Nickel Plate mainline through town to run gas-powered railcars - and played with the idea with a demonstration project in 1985. Even if the county got the rail line for free, the cost of operation, people, training, rail dispatch, maintenance, was far more than they could even raise off UMTA in Washington. Even though they love choo-choos in the UMTA.
It makes no sense. Buses work far better.
But the imbeciles in government, are not only not very bright, they're of arrested development. Still want to be playing with toy trains.