For all of our foaming, wishing and hoping, the fact is, that the D&RG, C&S and all variants, were businesses, not model railroads. Yes, They provided a service to the region they ran through, but they did it to make money. When they stopped making money, there was no reason to keep running.
In the book The Rainbow Route, There is a section toward the back of the book where they show the financials for the Silverton Railroad Co. through the years. It has always been amazing to me, how little revenue was taken in, and how much was paid out in taxes. Doesn't leave much for paying employees, suppliers, much less profits.
I suspect that the branch lines that are sited were loosing money to begin with. The problem the railroad had is that they had to pay taxes on every mile of track they had. The only way to stop paying is to remove the track. In the early years they could put track in and take it out to suit the traffic pattern as they saw it. With the existance of the ICC, now you had to convince the government that it wasn't viable before you could remove that track. Plenty of stories exist showing that a single shipper could stall the abandonment, forcing the railroad to keep paying wages, running trains, and paying taxes, so that shipper could keep paying an unrealistic tarif.
Passenger traffic was always a looser. Only thing that made it profitable is the Mail contract and carrying LCL freight on the baggage car. Fair or not, Once the unions and courts kept the company from doing it, there was no longer a good reason to run those passenger trains. By the '30s, the railroad was also competing with the federally funded highway system for business. Why compete for that?
In the end, we did end up with a pretty wonderful intermountain transit system. Its the road network that exists to this day. Anyone can go pretty much anywhere they want, any time they want. Don't have to wait for a train that is probably behind schedule anyway.
The only places in the US, and the world for that matter, where you find mass transit, you will also find high population density, and/or lack of other viable means of transportation. That combination exists along the eastern seaboard, and a few other places in the US. Out west thye have "wide open spaces" and don't need it. It wouldn't be responsive enough anyway.
Just some thoughts that were invoked by the discussion. Sorry to let reality creep into the conversation again.
