Comment by Spooky23
Railroads were pretty profitable for a long time. The western long haul routes were capitalized by land transfers.
What killed them was the same thing that killed marine shipping — the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.
> the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.
The age of postwar suburb growth would be more commonly attributed to WWII, but the records show these railroads were already losing money hand over fist by the WWI era. The final death knell, if there ever was one, was almost certainly the Great Depression.
But profitable and viable are not one and the same, especially given the immense subsidies at play. You can make anything profitable when someone else is covering the cost.