>>1196415Because cars and airplanes and buses.
Basically, everywhere fell for that, and it mostly came down to the fact that a lot of people just don't want to go into public transport when they can just drive. The thing which makes trains work in Europe is the fact that they're way cheaper than running a car, but even then, places like Germany and France have issues with people just driving their cars for 3 hours instead of taking the train, because a car is "private".
The whole problem really started with a trend which was falsely interpreted. Essentially, the railways in so many countries were incredibly expansive, had services throughout the day and were the backbone of the countries they were in.
What happened after WWII in most countries was a situation when people could afford cars, and as a result ridership dropped significantly. Ghost trains started running throughout the night and many services carried no passengers to many remote towns and villiages. The UK had the chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, a Mr. Beeching, run a report on why the railways in Britain were costing the government millions to run when it couldn't afford to do so. Beeching decided that trains were not being used, and that the trend would be that no one would be using trains in the near future. His report lead to the closure of most of the British rail network, and then lead to villiages and towns becoming abandoned since those towns and villiages no longer had connections to cities. Beeching thought that buses would serve anywhere where public transport was needed, and that the only railways which were profitable were intercity connections, and that they were the only ones worth keeping. Even then, Beeching said that cars would eventually overtake intercity trains.
So many countries did similar things, and I would say that other than Germany and France, which were severely limited economically until the late 50s, most countries either build roads or airports.
