Comment by palmotea
> That which survived, at least. A whole lot of rail infrastructure was not viable and soon became waste of its own. There was, at one time, ten rail lines around my parts, operated by six different railway companies. Only one of them remains fully intact to this day. One other line retained a short section that is still standing, which is now being used for car storage, but was mostly dismantled. The rest are completely gone.
How long did it take for 9 out of 10 of those rail lines to become nonviable? If they lasted (say) 50 years instead of 100, because that much rail capacity was (say) obsoleted by the advent of cars and trucks, that's still pretty good.
> How long did it take for 9 out of 10 of those rail lines to become nonviable?
Records from the time are few and far between, but, from what I can tell, it looks like they likely weren't ever actually viable.
The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math doesn't look like it would math.
Imagine where the LLM businesses would be if the government paid for all the R&D and training costs!