Comment by zdragnar

And yet, we already have them. Smelting enough steel and moving earth (and forests, and wetland, and prairie, etc) to also add passenger rail to anywhere you could want to go in the sparsely populated rural states would not be a net positive. There are a dozen or so villages within an hour drive of me that each have less than 1000 people living in them. The damage of adding roads and cars is already done. What good would connecting and powering light rail trains between these villages do?