Wherever I went in Britain, the trains were at least as good as cars would have been. And I've been on some of the shortlines, etc.
In the U.S. freight lines go everywhere. It's quite common that there's one adjoining a farm in the middle of nowhere, with a working siding. There is no reason passenger lines can't go everywhere, too.
No transportation infrastructure should be subsidized with taxes; it should all be financed by user fees or private investments.
This is sort of old-fashioned Friedmanesque economics. It's the same sort of thinking that imports inexpensive workers from India and puts them to work in Silicon Valley because local ones are more expensive. Eventually, people start to realize that it makes someone's bottom line better, but not theirs.
We need to subsidize an improved form of transport so that it can compete with the heavily-subsidized ones today (you're not going to tell me roads are privatized) and so that people won't have to sustain the totally insane cost of automobile ownership. In this way we put economics on the right track for everyone. We've really had a century-long economic distortion as far as automobiles are concerned, we are now starting to pay the price as energy costs increase and we see the ecological impact, etc. Let's help people get away from that.
The largest taxes you pay today are what you pay for the inflated price of land (indirectly if you are a renter, but you still pay) and the cost of an automobile, which can exceed $50K for 10 years of usage plus the rest of the cost of ownership.
Once place where I was near Zurich, admittedly an expensive area, wanted $2000/year for a commuter rail pass. I calculated that it was actually a very large savings over automobile ownership or even automobile use.