Man, I wish I could say that this seemed true for me.
I don't feel like pinning down my location in public, but it is sufficient to say that I'm very familiar with a place in Ohio that was once a booming with every kind of rail.
I can walk around and see where things used to be, and sometimes it's very clear.
But mostly, it seems like it has been transformed. Whereas people used to build around the paths of the rails, they've now built atop of where they used to be. It was once a straight shot with an occasional (and very deliberate) bend, but now there's a house and a factory and a substation in the path.
Or, Columbus Ohio again. :) That place used to have a very diverse passenger rail network, with a somewhat grand Union Station right in the middle where it counts. Rail was such a thriving and important thing that at one point they raised the level of the main drag, High Street, to help reduce conflicts between trains, pedestrians, and the various horsemobiles. For some of the old buildings that still remain, what was once the first floor is now the basement.
And in what seems like something that real libertarians would dream about, these railways were built privately and were self-sustaining.
Things changed.
In ~1979, they finally tore down the old Union Station just weeks before it was likely to be ruled a protected historic site and then put a very immobile convention center in its place instead.
Columbus has been expanding pretty rapidly (by Ohio norms) for a couple of decades now. The old rail paths are hard to find at all while walking around or in aerial shots, never existed in newer neighborhoods, and whatever was there has been further decimated by the batshit highway network that is in a continuous process of changing.
It's possible that it could all come back again, but the cost would be intense beyond imagination.
And even if it did come back again, who would ride the things, anyway? They've already got busses that they hate. Folks would still have cars, and they'd still drive them. I guess people might eventually be able to adjust to using trains to get places, if that became practical for them, but I'd also guess that this transition would take multiple generations to really take effect.