We need to democratize railroads and govern them like we do roads for cars with rubber tires. To do this we need to make the railroad tracks & railroad right of ways public property, the Class 1s lose their exclusive trackage rights but stay in business maintaining the tracks, much like state D.O.T.s do now.
Then we need to at least double track every mainline except the uppermost precarious sections. Triple track as much as we can. Pocket tracks & sidings for stationary rail vehicles, these will be privately maintained like parking lots & driveways. We innovate the rails themselves & the vehicles riding them. For heavily used track we gauntlet track with at least 2 pairs of rails for redundancy.
Suburbs parallel to tracks can have their own sidings and those who want can have spurs into their garages.
We save so much energy, keep our personal mobility machines & make rail travel great again!-- Dignium, Jun 05 2017random, halfbakery