Elliot makes a lot of valuable points, and one of the problems we have in the US is historically we have been really bad at doing things like planning and deciding the kind of things we are facing with rail travel, you mention planning and you get a lot of people coming out of the woodwork crying about various ism's, it is a plot, etc. What happens is we then often end up doing things ad hoc when the stuff hits the fan, we do crisis management rather than preventing it (in many ways, it is a direct parallel to health care and how we deal with it). One of the reasons for planning, in this case on a national scale, is to allow it to be analyzed across the board and to try to take out the tunnel vision that often cripples things with local interest or worse. A discussion about Amtrak has to be done on a national basis, on what is good for the country, as well as what is good for areas. One of the things that requires is having someone do an analysis who doesn't have a vested interest, the way for example congressional committees do, or having it done by a finance type who thinks only in dollars and cents. I'll give you examples of this, and why it causes so many problems, when it comes to trains:
1. Those who argue if rail service had value, it would pay for itself, the way 'other industries do'. Sounds rational to those who argue that, or who say "why should I pay for what others use?". On the other hand, there are a lot of businesses out there operating where they don't pay for themselves, it is not exactly new business operations. Analysis shows Government subsidizes the airlines and roads/trucking industry, shippers use ports run by governmental agencies often at prices cheaper than cost, industries operating where federal dams provide power (the TVA districts, including the auto transplants in Kentucky and Tennessee, manufacturing in the pacific northwest), where they get the power at cost, compared to triple those rates from private power. So those subsidies to the trucking industry mean things get delivered cheaper than they otherwise would; cheap power creates jobs across a region that before TVA had relatively few...so arguing that about trains is nothing more than self interest
2. Likewise, when making spending decisions, you cannot simply look at the cost versus revenue, especially with infrastructure like this. If the NE corridor needs 42 billion in capital spending, analysis requires saying what is the cost if I don't do this?Not only opportunity cost in the possibility of more travel on the NE, if it runs faster with fewer delays, but also declines if the service starts to deteriorate....then, too, if the NE corridor isn't fixed, what happens to already crowded air corridors and roads? How much would we need to spend to fix roads, how much money will be lost to delays for extra traffic on roads, for crowded airlines, cost of upgrading flight systems to handle more traffic, etc? There are costs to doing/not doing things, and they need to be accounted for.
3.Then too there are what is known as social costs, and they are harder to discern. For example, what happens to the small towns that lose rail service? Does it have no impact, or does it help cause the further decline of a town, the perception that it is dead (and obviously, I am asking that as a question, not as an answer). How will people who can't drive long distances feel, especially if there is no local airport? And if it doesn't matter, then why as a matter of policy do we subsidize flying into airports in relatively lightly traveller rural areas, why not have them drive to the nearest airport in a more populated area?
The reason that China spent money of trains, including high speed trains, is based on need. China's manufacturing is generally located in certain areas, near the coastal region, around some of the bigger cities, and they have been relying on labor that comes from elsewhere in the country. At certain times of the year, especially Chinese New Year, they have large mass migrations of people, and need the trains to handle that. Too, China also I suspect learned lessons from other places, like Europe and yes, the US, and looked at the costs of people travelling by car, looked at airline congestion, and I believe they decided that trains helped create a balanced approach. For one thing, China doesn't have the penetration of the car we do, and while they have built a lot of roads and highways, a lot of people don't have cars..so they have a need.
Europe made a decision post world war II when it came to travel, and they decided to emphasize the trains over individual travel in cars. Given how crowded Europe can be, given the cost of building and maintaining roads, and also how dependant they are on importing oil and gas, they decided it made more sense to favor trains, while also for example making it expensive to drive cars (the registration fees are high, and gas taxes make gasoline 8 or 9 bucks a gallon last I checked).
The US obviously is unique, and we have unique problems, too. China is one country and they don't have quite the balance between central government and regions, as someone pointed out, the US because of our dual system of federal government and local government, it can be hard to do the kind of policy we are talking about. You can have where a state government doesn't care about rail travel, actively opposes it, while you have local congressmen who gets upset when Amtrak cancels service in his/her area *shrug*.
In the end questions like the ones I posed need to be answered, looking at all the factors when it comes to rail travel and see what conclusions can be drawn from that, what needs investment, what makes sense, what doesn't, which isn't being done today. Whether it is Amtrak themselves, elected officials, rail fans, Joe Public, you name it, my view of it is that they all come into this with bias and their 'answers' are framed that way, whether it is the person resentful of 'paying for those people to use trains' (leaving out their own hand in the till), or the congressman with one hand wanting to slash government spending on Amtrak saying 'the government shouldn't be in the rail business' while pushing for subsidies for businesses they care about, or infrastructure for their area, etc. Almost everyone agrees, if with varying views, that the NE corridor makes sense (whether they think it should be run privately or by the government, subsidized but run privately, how much should be spent), but we need an overall picture to make the real decisions, and that is one thing I doubt we will see.
) - are prime examples of that - for the reasons you state (there were, of course, a few individuals who also profited ...). The interstate highway system is largely paid for by the US gummint - and it started with essentially a dual purpose - the civilian population and economy and national defense -- the latter was of concern (in 1955) because it was still thought that evacuation of cities was possible in the event of an "atomic attack". It turns out, a third purpose was also at play according to Eisenhower's biographer (Ambrose) - a public works program that would employ a lot of people (gee, spending on infrastructure, what a novel thought).