Comment by sailfast
It’s never been shared, FWIW. The rails are mostly privately owned and were built that way too.
That said - bullet trains are great but I fully support the ability of individuals to pay to access freight or passenger rail to subsidize the infra.
Land was granted to the railroads with the agreement that they would run passenger rail services. When passenger rail became so unprofitable that it was bankrupting rail companies, they lobbied to make it the governments responsibility to move people around and leave them to make money shuffling freight.