China is a pretty big place too, they didn't just give up. I have been on a fair bit of the train from Chicago out to LA, the flat bit through cornfields where you go to sleep and wake up a few hours later to the same view.
On that train I was shocked that it was six hours late. It got even later so I didn't get to see anything of Chicago, my day seeing the sights was not going to happen, the next train I was to catch - to Boston was waiting at the station.
What I was absolutely not prepared for was the reality that this rail link was just the one lot of tracks. In Europe you can expect four lines of tracks for fast and slow rains each way or just the two lines of tracks in rural areas, if there is just the one track you can expect that to be seriously rural, but even then you can expect a train every hour, even if the service is run down.
I was pretty much at starvation point waiting for the train to Chicago, since there was no useful information and no concessions at the platform I could not leave for that six hour wait as the train could arrive 'at any moment'. Then the speed of the thing was glacial, sometimes stopped for an eternity to let a more important freight train through.
Trains are competitive with planes although this is not believed in America. That 'two hour flight' never is, there are airports to get to, check in to be done, being divorced from one's luggage and a whole host of practical concerns that are not a problem when you have a rail network that has city/town centre stations rather than middle of nowhere airports.
Building a railway across China is not made magically easier because of some 'authoritarian government'. The railway still has to go across mountain ranges and houses have to be demolished with lots of complicated land rights issues every inch of the way. Putting two tracks through all those cornfields of middle America is a walk in the park by comparison. Two tracks are also cheaper to maintain, the wear is halved compared to the single track that you get in America.
Admittedly the Rocky Mountains do require a bit of route planning to get over, but compared to the terrain of China the grades are easy. Then there is Japan, on the Ring of Fire and requiring even more engineering.
The automobile may have benefits but having to hold that wheel thing and keep an eyeball on the road ahead is a bit silly. Trains just make more sense, the rails do the steering bit, plus passengers don't have to total approximately four.
Planes are a bit silly too, sure they have their place crossing from the edge of an ocean to another edge of an ocean, but planes can't stop off en-route to let passengers off and on with no more than a five minute pause per stop.
Often the US interstate highways have a median down the middle that is a hundred or more metres wide, perfect for putting some tracks down without having any land rights tussles.
For generations Americans have been electing the interests of Wall Street and The Pentagon into office, knowing full too well that the Democrats and the Republicans are fundamentally the same, receiving political contributions from the same military-industrial-complex. When the rare thing happens that a Ralph Nader comes along the Democrats double down on voting Democrat and berate the Ralph Nader candidate for splitting the 'liberal' vote to let the Republicans in, blaming all their woes on him instead of the interests of international capital that print money to keep everyone in debt.
Rail need not be absent from the US forever, high speed lines in interstate medians could cover the country in ten years, with huge benefits for 'making America great again'. But with 700+ billion spent on defence and a similar sum spent on paying interest on 22 trillion dollars of debt there is no money for the American government to invest a cent in anything that could be instrumental in the prosperity of the US. It was industrial capital under a different dollar that made 'America great', since WW2 America has been coasting, with everyone working harder and harder, under this new regime of 'international finance capitalism'. The 'free market' actually means freedom from this pernicious vulture capitalism that has sucked the industrial lifeblood out of America.
If times change and the American people take up their 'amendment rights' to see to the people that control their currency then America could join the rest of the world and have nice things like a modern rail network in a lot less time than what it took China to get theirs.