That's not true at all, those towns are common across the Midwest and the South of the US. The only difference is that the rails are freight, so you have to us

That's not true at all, those towns are common across the Midwest and the South of the US. The only difference is that the rails are freight, so you have to use the highway to get anywhere. I grew up in several of those towns. I don't think I lived more than a 15 minute bike ride from the railroad tracks until I was in my 20s. If Wikipedia can be trusted, upon construction over 80% of the farms in the Midwest Corn Belt were within 5 miles of a railroad (which is an area roughly 5 times the size of Germany). I never lived close to a passenger train station until I moved to a big city. There are lots of small towns where there's a semi-dense urban core with a grocery store or two, a couple bars, a few restaurants, apartments and some shops. A lot of them even exist within a fairly small radius of major cities. Nobody builds rail anyways. My personal guess is that the major city doesn't want to pay for the rail, and the sleepy towns can't afford to pay for the rail. That's why most of what we see is major cities connecting, because they get enough economic activity out of those rails to justify the connection.