They don’t fear safety of rail, but they do have rail related fears. They fear that rail is too slow and expensive to build and to use. They fear it’s worse for the environment thanks to several major ecological disasters caused by bad rail stewardship (and I suppose they do fear safety there too). They fear it’s just too inconvenient for practical use.

I’m a huge rail supporter but we don’t do it any favors by not acknowledging the reality of how fucked it is in some major markets. It’s for a long time been treated by Americans as the inconvenient thing we used before airplanes and cars that only makes sense in New York, DC, and Chicago. As well as the “what if the greyhound was also unaffordable and didn’t go where you want” option for cross continental travel. Europe seems to have treated it as the option for staying in your country and getting around your city.

With neither a cross Schengen heavily subsidized and standardized system that is designed to outcompete air travel or a massive change in how amtrack is treated and going from seeing it as a corporation owned by the American people that needs to support itself to a public resource that is supposed to take a loss when it needs to akin to how the post office used to be treated then rail isn’t going to beat air. California and France can’t do this alone