I think one of the problems is that passenger trains don't get a lot of business so it's difficult to scale up? Plus the railroads seem to be owned by different private companies so maybe that contributes to the problem too.
Off-topic:
In the early 90s I was a happy Chinese boy who travelled between Hefei (the provincial city of Anhui province) and Wuhu (another city in Anhui province) by train frequently. Back then the passenger trains had three categories: 1) Slow (stopped at almost every station); 2) Fast and 3) Passenger-Fast. "Passenger-Fast" was the fastest and other trains including freights gave way to it. But it was also the most expensive one so I generally took "Slow" or "Fast". For a mere 150KM it usually took 5 hours and more with half of the time spent on waiting for other trains to pass. The worst part was that Hefei and Wuhu sit at opposite sides of the Long River so I had to get off the train at the north side and take a passenger ship to reach Wuhu. The whole journey could take as much as 7~8 hours.
But it was also pretty fun. I was able to lift the windows and stick my neck out to look for trains on the other track (very dangerous!). The locomotives were steam engines (steam engines were largely being replaced but some were retained) and I still dreamed of their roaring occasionally when dreaming.
I have heard it said that with public transit (including inter-city travel) service drives demand. Until you can rely on it for your commute people don't use it at all. For inter-city rail the "service" includes getting you to a location where you don't need to already magically have a car there to use.
But I'm not so sure where this idea comes from, I've heard it said but not seen actual research. It seems simple, but you can't just take a high speed rail and put a stop in the middle of nowhere and expect a city to pop up. Clearly as in their example for Waterloo thoughtful service might drive demand but useless service not so much.
I'm not sure about inter-city travel because as you said the train can't just stop in the middle of no where. But I think it works for subways and buses, at least in China.
China has a different model of city economic expansion and here is the basic idea:
- Government identifies new areas to develop (they could be "out of city" but usually just suburbs/rural);
- Public transits were developed to cover those lands before others move (so no malls, no hospitals, no residential buildings, etc.);
- Because it takes a lot of time and money to develop public transit, city sometimes issue bonds;
- Other buildings start to move in, usually starting from residential buildings and malls;
- City expects the revenue and tax from newly developed lands to cover the cost of bonds
This sort of "creates" new cities (actually they are called satellite cities) but I don't think it gets to extend very far.
It's the staggering cost of building rails. It takes an extreme amount of money, and it pays off over a long horizon.
I don't think there's enough confidence that trains will retain popularity over that long of a horizon. Climate change regulation might threaten it, another form of transportation might threaten it (i.e. flying, or underground super speedways), or remote work take off and cut demand for travel. Who knows, but I don't think anyone wants to stake billions of dollars on it.
Then there's the fact that we've passed a lot of regulations since the last time we built a lot of railways. The environmental ones are a real killer for anything that traverses a lot of terrain, because you'll inevitably end up buried in a sea of lawsuits requiring surveys.
The latest high-speed passenger rail I've seen is California's, which is up to an $80 billion budget for ~800 miles of track. I'm sure people will argue it's a bad example, but that's a massive investment, and it won't make returns until it's built. There aren't a lot of people that are willing to put $80 billion on the line in a flailing business sector, where they don't expect to see returns for at least a decade.
Here you go. The first column is the departure time, second column is the total time spent as well as the shift(anything starting with K is passenger-fast and D is high speed railway), third column is arrival time and Last column is price.
Off-topic:
In the early 90s I was a happy Chinese boy who travelled between Hefei (the provincial city of Anhui province) and Wuhu (another city in Anhui province) by train frequently. Back then the passenger trains had three categories: 1) Slow (stopped at almost every station); 2) Fast and 3) Passenger-Fast. "Passenger-Fast" was the fastest and other trains including freights gave way to it. But it was also the most expensive one so I generally took "Slow" or "Fast". For a mere 150KM it usually took 5 hours and more with half of the time spent on waiting for other trains to pass. The worst part was that Hefei and Wuhu sit at opposite sides of the Long River so I had to get off the train at the north side and take a passenger ship to reach Wuhu. The whole journey could take as much as 7~8 hours.
But it was also pretty fun. I was able to lift the windows and stick my neck out to look for trains on the other track (very dangerous!). The locomotives were steam engines (steam engines were largely being replaced but some were retained) and I still dreamed of their roaring occasionally when dreaming.