Yeah but it’d be fucking insane to build a state highway to each and every destination in every hamlet, just like it would be for rail.

And it’s not just cost of initial construction, it’s also cost of maintenance. If the ground shifts slightly under the road, it’s a bump. If it shifts under a railway, it’s a derailment for the first train that finds it and a couple million dollars in recovery and repair, plus the downtime while that section is out of service. And that doesn’t even start to account for overhead like signal operation, whereas on a road you just use a stop sign.

I like trains more than the next guy, but you absolutely cannot just replace every road with a railway.