An integral part of US frontier history is seemingly centered around building railways, connecting remote areas with the major coastal cities, moving cattle, and moving new settlers around. Why is the modern US seemingly devoid of railway construction and usage, but dominated by plane, truck and car?
This seems even stranger when considering that railways are more energy efficient than trucks in moving goods.
For the most part, it’s still around. The US doesn’t have construction of railways because we already have lots of them. All the big transcontinental routes you read about from the 19th century are, for the most part, still in place (with some adjustments).
There has been some contraction, though. There are two interrelated factors here. One is the rise of modern trucking. While rail is, on a per-mile basis, more efficient, it does not beat trucking in all respects. Not every manufacturing plant has rail access. Nor does it really work economically to ship smaller items by train, compared to trucks—you can have a truck drive a small piece of industrial equipment from one place to another directly, but a single traincar load will be collected by a local train that picks up from industrial tracks, perhaps be arranged into a mixed freight train to another area, then dropped off by another local train. This takes much longer than simply loading a truck.
This was greatly accelerated by the interstate highway system in the mid-1900s, which made that trucking infrastructure much faster. And that infrastructure was government-funded, both in its construction and maintenance (though many major rail lines had their construction subsidized too). Some routes were no longer economically feasible, when rail was not the only shipping option.
The other factor is the consolidation of American railroads. Because of the rise of interstate trucking, some monopoly concerns for railroads have diminished, and more railroads have merged. Because of this some railroads have merged and closed duplicate routes. But that’s not always true. In the Northeast, for instance, there are two complete routes from New York to Washington DC—one built by the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the other in pieces from the Baltimore & Ohio, Reading, and Central Railroad of New Jersey. Both are still in use, the former by Amtrak and various commuter railroads, and the latter as a freight route (with some commuter service).
If you’re asking about passenger railroads, the story is mostly the same, but to a greater extent. Air travel was much faster than rail, and car travel was faster particularly for short distances, and in newly built suburbs that may or may not have had rail access. Railroads were in serious financial trouble in the mid-1900s, and their passenger service was losing money. Regulations forbade them from closing this service, even if they were little-used and there were other transportation options in the area. In the 1970s the government allowed railroads to hand over this obligation to Amtrak, a government-formed passenger railroad, which would operate this service over other railroad’s tracks. Amtrak was able to close duplicate or lightly-used service. After airline deregulation made air travel much cheaper than it had been in the 1970s.
There has been relatively little construction of new routes in the US, but that’s mostly because the network already exists. Apart from high-speed networks, very little new rail has been constructed in the last several decades. Many routes were constructed when rail was the only feasible option for transport, there aren’t many routes that make sense now that didn’t make sense when the US was building railways.