The railroads were the airlines of the late 1800's and on to the end of WW II. If you wanted to get someplace overnight, you went by train. When you went to "the city", you went by train or maybe by bus. When you went to a summer camp across state, you went by train or by bus. The rails did a fine job of putting up poster showing the luxury of dining on a fast-moving train, and the Pullman company did a great job of selling the romance and the finery, not to mention the promise, to the rails first, and from there to the traveling public. Later, the elegance went hard in favour of the airlines...it became the cool way to go.
Sadly, the rails never made a buck hauling passengers. It was a duty in exchange for grants. Our first rail company in Canada, the CPR, went to court three times to divest itself legally of the requirement to run an RDC up and down Vancouver Island in perpetuity, with the third and last time being at the SOC (Supreme Court of Canada). That body agreed that the CPR should not be burdened with an RDC running maybe six passengers a day along the 100 miles of tracks it serviced. But, according to its charter, that was the CPR's liability in perpetuity. "We gave you huge land grants (20 miles on either side of the right-of-way all the way across Canada!) and money, and you agreed to run passenger service. Period." That was the government's and unions' positions. Thankfully, the SOC said it was not in keeping with the intent of the Charter as foreseen at the time.
I like the rails for all the reason everyone else does....freight, pax, it makes no mevermind to me. I like the slow grinding coal drags with distributed power. I like the fast freight with those powerful engines at the front, and I like the fast(er) pax service with the Duplexes and Northerns hauling them. If I have only two complete consists on my layout, and that is usually the case, one of each will be available for me to play with.
