As a Brit, personally, I reckon it's because the train system lost the ball significantly last century.
Train tickets now are often more than the cost of petrol to drive across the country. So if you'd spend more on a train ticket, why not drive?
Sometimes it even cheaper to get a flight from Glasgow to London than it is to get the train.
To get a ticket, a week in advance, to go from Carlisle (where I live) to London costs roughly 120 pounds (that's 180 USD, ish).
It's crazy expensive, and the benefit really isn't there any more.
Goods wise, trains could / should have taken the same kind of approach that the shipping industry did, with containers.
If our company (live events A/V stuff, mainly) is doing an event down south, we should be able to call a train company, have them deliver a container (or pick up one that we own) at our warehouse on a flat bed truck, we load it, they take it to the train station, it get craned on, and then we minibus down there the next day and have it delivered to the location. But no, it's easier and cheaper for us to run our own bunch of trucks.
If there was a service like that, we'd use it.
Train tickets now are often more than the cost of petrol to drive across the country. So if you'd spend more on a train ticket, why not drive?
Sometimes it even cheaper to get a flight from Glasgow to London than it is to get the train.
To get a ticket, a week in advance, to go from Carlisle (where I live) to London costs roughly 120 pounds (that's 180 USD, ish).
It's crazy expensive, and the benefit really isn't there any more.
Goods wise, trains could / should have taken the same kind of approach that the shipping industry did, with containers.
If our company (live events A/V stuff, mainly) is doing an event down south, we should be able to call a train company, have them deliver a container (or pick up one that we own) at our warehouse on a flat bed truck, we load it, they take it to the train station, it get craned on, and then we minibus down there the next day and have it delivered to the location. But no, it's easier and cheaper for us to run our own bunch of trucks.
If there was a service like that, we'd use it.