America's passenger rail sucks, it couldn't compete with airplanes and every train company got out of the business, abandoning it to the government. But America does have a great deal of freight rail which sees a lot of use (much more than in Europe, I don't know how it compares to China though.)
One reason the passenger service sucks is that the freight rail companies own the tracks, and are happy to let a passenger train sit behind a freight train for a couple hours waiting for space in the freight yard so it can get out of the way.
Humans are also freight, of course. It is not like the rail companies really care about what kind of fright is on the trains, so long as it is what the customer considers most important (read: most profitable). Humans are deprioritized exactly because they aren't considered important by the customer, which is to say that the customer, who is also the freight in this case, doesn't really want to be on a train in the first place. The customer would absolutely ensure priority (read: pay more, making it known that they are priority) if they wanted to be there.
I understand the train geeks on the internet find it hard to believe that not everyone loves trains like they do, but the harsh reality is that the average American Joe prefers other means of transportation. Should that change in the future, the rail network will quickly accommodate. It has before!
The root cause is Americans, generally, prefer any mode of transit other than rail, so passenger rail isn't profitable, so train companies naturally prioritize freight.
For what it's worth, I like traveling by train and do so whenever I can, but I'm an outlier. Most Americans look at the travel times and laugh at the premise of choosing a train over a plane. And when I say they look at the travel times, I don't mean they actually bother to look up train routes. They just know that airplanes are several times faster. Delays suffered by trains never get factored into the decision because trains aren't taken seriously in the first place.
