US uses quite a bit of rail, just not for long distance travel. DC metro for example has stations over 30 miles out, with other options extending that to over 60.

A big part of this is having unsubsidized parking, if you or your company is paying 20+$/day on top of driving the incentives change.

Freight trains are still a thing. About 20 years ago Buffet bought BNSF.

Thus the long distance travel caveat.

US Fright is doing ok, but it got heavily dependent on coal which is going away fast.

In US, number of miles of rails only ever goes down.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183410/united-states-cla...

Removing redundancy is one way efficiency has gone up so much.

https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/Figure1_5_0.gif