For passengers, yes, but primarily it’s poor for passengers because the infra is owned by freight companies that aren’t interested in passenger service. And rail freight service in the US is mostly pretty good.
And, at the time, they needed a lot of rail across huge distances. The transcontinental rail lines were hugely expensive and had immense amounts of graft involved in every step of their construction, but they got built. Also enabled the crushing of Native Americans, which was a usually-somewhat-tacit (though sometimes very explicit) goal in Washington.
The U.S. has the best rail infrastructure in the world. It’s just designed for moving cargo across what used to be the world’s largest industrial center instead of moving passengers around.
The second sentence of your article addresses my point:
> As tourists and students studying for a semester we aren’t going to interact with electrical or plumbing related infrastructure that acts behind the scenes as long as it works. The infrastructure we are most concerned about as people traveling is transportation, specifically passenger transportation.
The U.S. isn’t a tourist country and hasn’t optimized its rail infrastructure for moving tourists around. Its infrastructure is optimized for moving raw materials and finished products around a huge single market.
The US, before deregulation, had a whole lot of railroads going bankrupt. This was partly because factories closed but the railroad couldn't abandon the line that served those factories, because of regulation.
I mean, they are still regulated, and they still have to go through regulators to abandon a line (IIUC), but it's much faster than it was.
And, at the time, they needed a lot of rail across huge distances. The transcontinental rail lines were hugely expensive and had immense amounts of graft involved in every step of their construction, but they got built. Also enabled the crushing of Native Americans, which was a usually-somewhat-tacit (though sometimes very explicit) goal in Washington.