The condition is actually, or nearly, the same with most “high speed” rail routes in the world. Few if any can be run on their own fare revenues.
Trains started to be used from passengers in the first decade of the 1800s.
Airplanes are about a century more modern than trains. Even the “motor vehicles”, including the large multi-passenger variety (buses) are more modern than trains, again by nearly a century. Yet the nostalgia for trains persist.
They - passenger trains - have their greatest and most efficient use in very large densely populated and connected urban areas (the northeast corridor from between Boston and Washington D.C., for instance). Outside of that nearly always financial black holes.
Exactly. trains are 1840 technology.
Nowadays are loosing money everywhere and have any use only in very densely populated areas.
E.G. Spain had a very aggressive high speed train program, which basically bankrupted the whole nation.