I agree with trains, for both cargo and passengers. My Mother says the truckers union was behind the demise of trains being used to haul cargo.
Trains still haul an awful lot of cargo; what they seldom haul (outside the BOS-NYC-DC corridor) is people, and it is a combination of several factors that are behind that, going back to the late 1940's.
The US National Highway System was (and probably still is) the biggest pork barrel ever built, and I remember just about all the dinner-table conversation when I was a kid in the early 60s bringing up this or that new highway project. If I had a dollar for every time my Dad got hired to work on a building because "word is a new highway is going in through there" I'd be rich now. The concrete contractors wanted new highways, the trucking companies wanted new highways, the truckers (who WERE mostly Teamsters back then) wanted them, hotel chains wanted them, restaurant chains wanted them, automobile manufacturers REALLY wanted them; and the Congressional representatives and lobbyists in bed with those industries put their shoulders to the task with single-minded devotion. Job one was crippling rail.
I don't know if we can truly bring back passenger rail, but if you think that AmTrak is feeding at the public trough, think about how many tax incentives go to the construction of highways and to the automotive industry; no one is in the transportation business for altruism.
Rail is efficient, especially over medium-distance routes, such as between major cities in a single region. ...
Which brings me to MY modernization wish: the air traffic control system. I think that if we managed to shifted the burden of short intercity routes to trains again, we could gain enough slack to fix the flight system properly, and hopefully get rid of such silliness as arriving at an airport two hours early in order to take a 30 minute flight.