Possible return of Passenger trains

I love travelling by train. I once took the train across Canada from Ontario to BC., and also from Vancouver to San Francisco.
And I lived two blocks from the end of the line on Vancouver Island, and took the train, which is no longer running, back and forth to Victoria several times. (Those tracks were originally slated to go all the way up the Island, but ended up stopping halfway, in Courtenay, as apparently it was a too expensive engineering project to build a train bridge across the Puntledge River)

Yes, train traveling can be fun. I have taken a train across Myanmar in SE Asia and across Egypt from Cairo to Ashwan. Both times we booked a whole private coach car to ourselves.

I believe that was was about 1980 or 1981 that I took the train from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City, Changed trains in San Luis Poyasi and slept to Mexico City. Great experience.

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I am from EUrope so train travelling is still going on there but I am afraid it eventually will be out since they have to be subsidized by the governments and lose money .. I am sorry I never went on one of the large ocean liners that also disappeared as mode of transportation. Now we have cruisesor epensive cabins on container ships but the ocean liners are gone and the train will disappear little by little..Never went on the old Orient epress either. Such a shame.

Back in 1969 I took an ocean liner from Europe to NY. It was pretty cool.

I can't speak to Canada, but here in Mexico and especially in the US, the rail lines were turned over to freight travel, and passenger service is almost non-existent. While some complain about that (I love travelling on trains), it makes freight movement fast and cheap. So the cost of reintroducing passenger trains is slower freight trains, meaning greater cost for everything else you buy.

In Europe, the advent of cheap local air travel put a huge dent in the once great European train system. Now it's coming back. Over Night Trains are popping up, and more high-speed options, too. France either passed or is considering a law eliminating national flights when a direct rail connection exists, for climate purposes. Deregulation is allowing national train lines to compete outside their borders, will also improve the outcome for passengers.

A fast Mexico City-Guadalajara route would be great, and one line either up the Gulf or Pacific coast and connecting to the US, or both.

As to America, I've ridden Amtrak several times: generally poor service, minimal schedules, and frequent delays. Without federal government subsidies, it would have gone bankrupt years ago.

That's not entirely Amtrak's fault. For one thing, the federal government interferes with it's scheduling, making it keep unprofitable routes for political reasons. But mostly it's because the feds turned over control of the rails to the freight companies, making Amtrak "rent" time on the rails, and making them the last priority when they do so. Which is the problem having any attempt to revive Pax rail in the USA or in Mexico.

Before retiring and moving Lakeside I worked for Canadian Pacific   as a Freight Conductor aboard our trains in Wisconsin/MN/IA & Illinois. We rented tracks to Amtrak who often had "right-of-way" because they paid for it. However as anal as CP Management was for on-time performance from our freight crews, NEVER did they blame passenger rail traffic.

Freight schedules are more flexible and scheduling around passenger rail is not a difficult task since rail tracks are often underutilized. The extra revenue from passenger rail may help keep freight rates more reasonable for rail customers. BRING IT ON!

This thread got me thinking how many things are deemed not financially viable, not because they can't pay for themselves, but because they don't generate enough profit for greedy upper
management and shareholders or suffer from senseless corporate decisions.

Where I used to live on Vancouver Island, there is a public transit system, which far more people would avail themselves of if the buses ran more frequently with more bus stops. They use these huge buses that sometimes only have a handful of people on them, and use the excuse that they can't afford to beef up the frequency and number of buses because ridership is low. But it wouldn't be low if it was practically convenient. They could use a fleet of mini-buses instead of those huge buses, which would be full in a big city, but not in a small one, which would be less costly to run, so there could be more of them and they would be full.

As it is, unless people are retired, unemployed, or on vacation, most don't have the time to arrange their lives to catch the bus to a doctor's appt. if the bus only comes by once an hour and you have to walk 5 blocks to a bus stop.

Here's a 2012 Congressional report on the topic re the US. Things have gotten much worse since then:
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R42512.html