In this article, the author makes a comparison that removing net neutrality "will ruin the internet, just like government intervention wrecked the railroads."
Is there any truth to this statement, did government intervention break up some kind of rail monopoly?
The article doesn't mention any detail about how they think the railroads have been wrecked. The US railroad industry is thriving, much of it having the government to thank. The US railroad industry is privatized and has been since the end of the Civil War in 1865.
In the late 1960s the privately owned railroads were losing passenger revenue to cheap cars and the still expanding federal interstate highway system. The railroads began discontinuing passenger services entirely and focusing all their efforts on freight. It was the federal government that stepped in in 1971 and founded Amtrak to keep passenger rail service from disappearing entirely.
Later when a number of major railroads in the northeastern states started falling into bankruptcy it was the US federal government that founded Conrail in 1976 to keep the lines open and the freight traffic from drying up.