[devilbunny]

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.