Do you live in the midwest? I know in Washington and Oregon the rail system never really decayed all that much, and it's still common to see a lot of rail traffic, along the Columbia river especially. But a lot of rail lines were torn up, or allowed to deteriorate past a level which would be cost effective to repair them. I'm under the impression that rail is probably in use now more than it was, say, twenty years ago, but can't say why I believe this.

Used to live in the intermountain west. The "city" I lived in had a large railway switching station for cargo (Union Pacific? I'm not exactly sure). However, I assumed the level of freight they carried was dropping due to the fact that the newspapers were occasionally full of stories about layoffs, shift reductions, drop-offs in routes they serviced, etc. That's not to say they couldn't theoretically be carrying more freight on longer trains as I still got woken up at 4am by the whistles (not that I am complaining, it was a cool place to live) but it seemed likely that it was in decline, at least according to an observer from outside the industry.

   OK, a couple minutes of Googling found some support for my notion that railway commercial use was on the rise. The article seems to have been produced for lobbying purposes of some kind, but the raw numbers about volume  seem unlikely to be fake or distorted.

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

There's a tremendous amount of public money that gets poured into rail as well.  It just happens that the private railroad companies get to keep all the infrastructure, all the profits, and the public gets squat.  I wish I knew how this came to pass, but that's the way it works right now.  Consider that Amtrak and the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Board have used California state funds and bonds to quad-track the railroad from Oakland to Sacramento.  Who owns those four tracks?  Union Pacific.  Odd?  Yes.

The car companies bought up all the public transit in pre-WWII Los Angeles and just plain shut it down. I think that's about all you need to know to understand what happened in America. What did you think Who Framed Roger Rabbit was about?

escalators never fail; they just become stairs

Your point is well taken. However, it seems like now with the current worry about energy being at the forefront of the US domestic agenda it would be high time for some Conrail/Amtrack lobbyists to start asking for increased transcontinental railways funding. I wouldn't think the US car lobby would be very palatable at this time, especially with all of their financial troubles.

On a related note, I once met a guy who claimed to be a former chef on an Amtrak passenger train. Apparently he used to work all the touristy transcon routes and cook for all of the high rollers in some type of mobile 4 star restaurant setup. He said it was really classy, and at night you could get loaded and when the train passes through the Dakotas or Montana/Wyoming they'd have a glass roofed car set up and you could pass-out and look up at the heavens while butlers attended to your every need.

He claimed that the reason why vacationing domestically and traveling via train died off was due to the cheap fares overseas. Why visit the rockies on a train when you can go to Aruba or Africa for only a few hundred more? I would imagine this trend should reverse itself if air fares climb higher.

Of course, when I met him he was a snaggletoothed tow truck driver with a beard that would put ZZ Top to shame and he mispelled the word "Toast" on the damage waiver form when he hauled my wrecked vehicle back across state lines so I am not sure how reliable his stories were. Of course, your mileage may vary.