The thing is, a lot of this stuff happened in Europe too, at least qualitatively. Train operators were already unprofitable after WWI and were nationalized, and

The thing is, a lot of this stuff happened in Europe too, at least qualitatively. Train operators were already unprofitable after WWI and were nationalized, and after WWII, funding and infrastructure were lacking and cars were seen as flexible, democratic and increasingly cheap. For example in the UK the famous name is the Beeching Axe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe). I'd be very interested to see a comparative study of the US and Western (and Eastern) European countries' transport infrastructure in this period, but I've never found one.