I felt that one as a Brazilian (govt literally went "fuck trains, cars are the future!" for ~30 years starting in the 1950s)

It still is, if you're a piece of rail freight.

This has more to do with how commuter trains are forced to give priority to freight trains, causing delays, than actual travel times

Nah, Idaho can get fucked.

One reason for this is hurricanes are more frequent, and sometimes the notice level is too short to have safe evacuation from Miami through highway systems. There has been anger over deaths from evacuation, when a storm warning did not destroy as many homes as was "hoped"/feared.

I think because it has large populations on both coasts?

Chock Full-0-Sea ports

Is really the big reason. Less and less portage is going through the traditional East Coast hubs of NY and NJ, mostly going to places like Louisiana , Texas, and Florida instead.

Historically Florida has always been pretty big on trains as well. In fact you used to be able to take a train from Florida to Cuba....kinda. You could take a train across the overseas rail line to Key West where they would ferry the whole train car over to Cuba.

We used to be an actual country that did stuff, and that's because we weren't afraid to do cool stuff with trains.

But dood. Put a USPS fishbowl-connected car on the end with a sorter working inside and prepping for each stop, and watch FedEx sweat.

Freight rail is a lot less than it should be as well.

It is also owned by Private Industry without clear rules on what they can charge in that more than it should be.

The rails were only made with eminent domain, Private Industry should not be able to screw people on it, or give preference to large companies over people and small ones.

Yeah just get a slime mold to design it for us.

The biggest concern with that setup is how inefficient it is to reach the Pacific Northwest region, LA is a serious bottleneck on top of being a common endpoint in and of itself. A line that goes straight to either Seattle or Portland from the Northeast simplifies things a lot.

Then I must be autistic then, because I love trains and dream of having high speed rail.

I know two neurodivergent people that love trains, one is into models and the other trainspotting. They are correct too, trains are awesome.