Railroads certainly helped build the American West, the technology reaching its maturity during the very decades the US was expanding across the continent. Though the US government supported railroad construction with large land grants, ownership stayed relentlessly private in the US while many European and Asian nations brought railways under national ownership. That meant US railroads abandoned passenger service once it became unprofitable, and the US has not chosen to subsidize a new passenger rail network.

Railways originated as private enterprises in the United Kingdom and, shortly thereafter, in the US. As infrastructure undertakings of a scale not previously known, they were among the first enterprises to need a new legal concept: that of the private corporation. The industry, like many breathtaking new inventions, attracted a lot of “irrational exuberance” as well as outright fraud in the organization of the business enterprises and the construction of the lines. Soon, legislators reacted with securities regulation, and many states also forbade public subsidy to railroad companies who—like tech companies today—would pit towns against each other to see which would subsidize most highly a route through their city.

In Europe (and India and Japan), the decades of railway building coincided with the 19th century period of creating modern nation-states, and so railways in financial trouble were more readily brought under state or royal control. In some European nations this happened almost immediately, while in others it occurred in the wake of World War I. The US (and Canada) also built a number of railways to tie together the nations, notably the first Transcontinental Railroad (completed in 1869), but primarily did so by offering grants of free land rather than direct subsidy or taking ownership. Even though American railroads were receiving all kinds of government aid, US politics and public opinion steadfastly treated them as private enterprises, and a brief period of government control during the First World War was always seen an a temporary exigency to be ended as soon as possible.

Geography also played a role. Europe, India, and Japan are places with great density of settlements, meaning not only megacities could easily be connected by rail, but hundreds of smaller cities as well. Only a few regions of the US have similar settlement patterns. On the other hand, North America has vast seas of emptiness to transport coal, grain, petroleum, chemicals, and finished goods across at low cost. Thus, North American railroading came to serve the needs of freight shippers, and of railroad shareholders. In this sense, the US is not terribly different from the nations of South America, South Africa, or Australia. In the US, about 35% of freight moves by rail; in the EU only about 10% does. In the 20th century, railroads came to have a better understanding of their finances, leading most to realize that passenger operations were unprofitable—especially when US mail contracts were shifted in the 1960s to airlines—and they were abandoned as soon as regulators would permit. In 1971, the railroads were allowed to transfer their remaining passenger operations to the federally subsidized Amtrak.

For complex interconnected reasons of politics and national pride, a few nations have in the last 50 years chosen to make significant government investment in passenger service, usually entirely new networks of high-speed rail lines. This era began with Japan’s 1966 opening of the Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen; gained new impetus with 1980s/1990s decisions in France, Spain, and Germany; and spurred smaller networks in Scandinavia, Italy, Southeast Asia, South Korea, and even North Africa. All have now been completely dwarfed by the construction of an enormous new high-speed rail network in China.