Wonderful points.
Yeah, if rail was so nonviable, what about Vanderbilt, etc., etc., who made zillions running railroads?
Your point about walking to the train station is especially good.
Some here think on a car means "freedom." In a way it does, but in a way our society has become enslaved by the car. One or two people in a two-ton hunk of steel sailing down the Interstate is astoundingly inefficient. Cars require enormous expanses of pavement, they require space for parking (meaning huge garages in cities). Most of that stuff is publicly financed. Is it really desirable to drive 30 mi. round trip to a big box store for hardware? Is that "freedom"? Those stores are only possible because of enormous public investment in highways. Why not patronize a hardware store in your home town, and save all that time spent paralyzed in a car seat, probably guzzling a fattening soft drink from the myriad of cupholders which infest modern cars. In a train, quite unlike either a car or a plane, you can actually get up and walk around. A train station can actually be located in the heart of a city--not so an airport.
Railroads did not die a natural death because they were inefficient. The govt. sabotaged them with taxes, regulations, and union favoritism, then the govt. "had to" take them over "to save them." Exactly what the govt. is now doing with the health care industry. First they cripple the private system, then that becomes the pretext for socialism.