Why can’t we have nice trains? Because we don’t generally WANT nice trains. And the few that do want them seem to want other people to pay for them.
Being a resident of Tennessee, I find it really hard to fathom why the heck my tax dollars subsidize a railroad that doesn’t travel within 350 miles of my home.
If you ever saw the kind of regulations the Federal Railroad Administration has with respect to running passenger trains, I do not think you would have the opinion that people “don’t generally want nice trains”. The government makes them very, very difficult to realize and very, very expensive to run and maintain, especially when they never used to be. And of course, when the government does run the trains themselves, mostly in left-wing constituencies, they make the operation and maintenance even more expensive than it ought to be on top of all the regulations, and run them at any speed they want, usually very slowly.