[rob74]

Such extreme examples aside, but generally the expectation that rail transport has to be profitable is harmful. On one hand, people expect roads to be well-built and well-maintained so they can run their cars on them for free (with some exceptions), but when rail transport is subsidised with tax money to offer an environmentally friendly and competitive alternative to cars, they complain about it.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Expecting public infrastructure to be profitable is like expecting your bathroom to be profitable.

It's there to provide an essential service. Which you have to pay for.

Not only is it not a business - and not there to make money for shareholders - running it as if it were a business is ruinously expensive and distracting and hampers the service it's supposed to provide.

[beerandt]

If rail isn't profitable due to lack of demand, it likely also isn't environmentally friendly.

The rail efficiency sold to the public is based on projections that (generally) also made them profitable.

Rail efficiency decreases drastically as usage declines, as so much of the embedded energy and emissions is in the fixed cost of building out ROW and track, and ongoing MOW.

You need to operate at a high percentage of capacity in passengers per train, and high percentage of capacity in trains per track.

Efficient rail systems are relatively a highly constrained problem, due to said fixed cost of track, but also due to lack of flexibility to adapt to changes, both in routes (need to move/add track) and capacity (track at full capacity doesn't meet demand, but two tracks exceeds demand at cost of being inefficient). (Operating one track that doesn't fully meet demand increases prices and becomes an expensive but profitable point of stability.)

Which is why eg high-speed rail proposals in the US typically rely primarily on improving existing slow routes, and are limited to midrange distances. Too short and too long both push it to being more costly at reduced efficiency.