There is exactly one nice thing I can say about the USA rail system, and it kinda underscores essentially every issue we have with the rails today: the privately-owned railroads are absurdly good at moving freight.
If we were to ignore the entire notion of using trains to move passengers, then suddenly the American railroads are remarkable in how much tonnage they can move over across the continent, even with their horrifically skeletal network, and still achieve the highest energy efficiency for land transport. They really shouldn’t be as successful as they are, given that they have unionized labor, are not exempt from federal emissions regulations, and serve huge tracts of the country using only single-track lines dating back to the 19th Century.
To say that they’ve devoted all of their efforts to making freight work is an understatement. And it is from this foundation that all other uses of the rails are incompatible. And it shows.
The national passenger operator, when seeking to (re)start a line somewhere, must negotiate with host railroads – except when Amtrak owns the tracks, such as in New England – and that’s primarily a matter of paying for time on the track, plus the “inconvenience” of regular schedule services when most freight doesn’t really need to follow a schedule at all.
Unlike any other product or service, there is no eminent domain at the state-level for access to a railroad, so if a small public transit operator is rebuffed by the host railroad in their area, then that’s basically it. Only Amtrak has a right to use eminent domain for railroads, and that’s only ever been used once, resulting in a 20 year lawsuit to settle the matter at great cost.
Query whether a wealthy state like California or Texas can make a market-rate offer to outright buy the rail network within their state. I imagine the answer is yes, though this would have been much more useful if the idea came up when Southern Pacific was having their difficulties in the 1990s. Further query whether a state-owned railroad located in multiple states can unilaterally deny access to all other states – like what the private railroads can do. Who knows.