AH, ok, thanks. I do know the railways went into steep decline in America after 1960 ish,
That's a bit 'broad brush'.
The railways in the north east US in particular suffered almost a 'perfect storm' of de-industrialisation, modern highway building, airline growth, government regulation, excessive train crew sizes (standard freight train crew was 5 people) and unprofitable passenger services. This eventually resulted an ill-fated merger in 1968 of most of the NE railroads into one company - Penn Central - which then went bankrupt two years later. The fallout from that resulted in many of the longer distance passenger services being abandoned and the big-city commuter services becoming the responsibility of city/state transit agencies (Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, SEPTA, MARC, MBTA etc.). It also spurred the creation of Amtrak in 1971 to take over responsibility for most long-distance passenger services (and eventually the some of the infrastructure like the NEC). The freight railway part of Penn Central was later nationalised as 'Conrail', stripped back to a core network, freight rates de-regulated, crew sizes reduced to two, nursed back to profitability and then privatised (it later sold itself to two other railroads who got roughly 50% each of the route network).
Railroads in the rest of the US didn't suffer anything like as badly - there were some bankruptcies (the Rock Island was probably the biggest), and nearly all of them abandoned most of their long-distance passenger services, but generally mergers allowed parallel routes to be rationalised etc. to cut costs and remain competitive for freight.
