Most of the railway trips people were taking would be fairly short distance trips you'd now hop in a car for, not a plane. Inter-urban transit, not trans-continental. You can look at old railway connectivity maps of the US to see the kind of station density available along the lines. This is why the size of the US continent is not a really good explanation. It's like saying "Europe is too big for trains, which is why nobody rides trains in the Netherlands". You don't take a plane from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, and you wouldn't have taken a plane to get from Boston to Providence either. Trains also can serve small towns that airplanes don't, because you don't stop a plane at every town along the way between city centers. In fact, many towns just sprang up around train stations.
> In fact, many towns just sprang up around train stations.
And this is how the Japanese system works so well. The trains don't make money, but the massive improvements to land value near stations does and the train companies own that land.
They get to make money, society gets the personal and economic benefits of a functional public transit system.
Passenger trains on their own fundamentally do not make money for the operators in most cases, except perhaps specialty routes like airports: the value is distributed into society, but doesn't all come back as ticket prices. So any system where a train company is just a train company will either need heavy subsidy or will slowly wither away under "efficiency" drives.
What they do have is a huge pile of capital intensive resources that are juicy targets for vampiric extraction and captive markets that are slow to extract themselves when exploited (and slow to come back).
Long distance (200-800km) passenger rail operators do make money, as long as the infrastructure is at least partially publicly financed.
Which is also true for anything happening on roads.
Well, quite. A fully ticket-funded passenger rail system is a rare, rare thing. There are simply better ways to make money than going solo on building and running a railway and not either diversifying or getting state support.
Yes, it's true for roads, but no-one expects roads to all turn a profit in the way that rail lines have to. Even for place with road use fees for motorways, most people can access the road system for rather less than the cost to construct and maintain it.
Unprofitable roads don't get closed very often.
And, this does not include all of the (profitable) real estate projects these companies use to further increase ridership!
Well, I stand corrected!
However, it may not include the real estate income, but it does include the income from extra ridership created by the real estate being near the station.
It's true, the bullet train prints money for JR. But there are also many train companies that are only profitable because of their real estate holdings around the lines, especially smaller private companies like Tokyu.
Here: https://www.lincolninst.edu/app/uploads/2024/04/2198_1524_LP...
Page 296: Farebox recovery (%), 2005 125.3 (Tokyu Corporation’s entire network)
After the opening of the last Tokyo Metro line (Fukutoshin) -- with direct connection to Tokyu Toyoko line (Shibuya to Yokohama), the farebox recovery is surely much higher. I guess over 150%, but probably closer to 175%. The trains are jammed 8+ hours per day. This means that, excluding real estate development, the Tokyu train lines are profitable by themselves.
About Tokyu: "[S]maller"? Absolutely not. It is surely one of the top 5 largest private rail companies in Japan by revenue/profits. They are huge in the Tokyo area.EDIT -- Re-org only.