@p51:
China has the rural population you are talking about, and the Chinese have built quite a few rail lines from the cities to the rural areas, both high and low speed. Obviously, that is heavily subsidized by the government, but they have reasons to do that, they don't have the highway system the US does and air travel is very expensive for people living in those areas. Again, though, different country with different reasons.
The thing about rail passenger travel is we need to get out of the mindset that it be profitable, or that it should run itself IMO. A lot of the things we consider affordable get subsidies of various sorts to be able to operate, trucks for example cause more damage to roads then they pay in road use and fuel use taxes, the airline industry is subsidized as they don't bear the full cost of the FAA and air traffic control system, they don't pay full cost for using airports, and there are a number of tax breaks they get that are a de facto subsidy, cars enjoy their own form of subsidies in the form of relatively cheap gasoline, and in how highway dollars are allocated and so forth (users of highways in more rural states, for example, get a lot more money from the federal highway fund then they put in).
The reason for subsidizing railroads is something many cities and regions have found out, that subsidizing railroads and other transit gives back a lot more economically then it costs in subsidies. The subway system and commuter rail and commuter busses ends up repaying back a multiplier, time and again this has been shown for the region around a hub like NYC or the like, that it generates a multiple of the cost of running them in the form of subsidies. That doesn't mean it makes sense to support train service to every little town and such or to run long distance trains coast to coast, Amtrak has a burden kind of like airlines had before deregulation, where they had to take certain routes to areas that aren't really profitable to serve, and in that day and age the profits they made off the more lucrative routes (which had fair trade pricing applied ie no competition on price as part of the deal) subsidizes the losers. Amtrak doesn't make money, but the cost of providing train service to many areas is such that it sucks money out of the routes that do make sense and could potentially if not break even, operate with less subsidies or even better, use the subsidies to improve the operations that make sense.
The one eye opener this guy may face is if he tries to rationalize train service, how many congressmen and senators will be on his case if he tries to get rid of routes that make no sense and to rationalize the system, he will hear howls and threats from one end of congress to the other, if he cuts "their' train service.
