Once you leave the NE and Eastern Seaboard, you find if you dig deep that many moderately sized towns are where they are and space to allow a farmer to get up early and ride his horse and wagon into town and back in one day. For a lot of reasons these towns survived for 100 or more years. (Not all though.) Now things have changed. Upgrading phone switches, finding someone to run a grocery store, putting in a cable TV network, running train service, to these places just doesn't pay. Especially if you are forced to charge state wide flat rates. Your high prices make you lose customers in larger cities and the huge capital requirements to update non profitable areas tie up your ability to move forward. It's a mess but we have a Midwestern economy based on 1900 economics. For many areas the only thing keeping them afloat is riverboat gambling.
If I like an area and want to live there, I'll live with what it has. If not I'll move. I've done it before. I'll likely do it again.
No argument here, the airline industry and how the government and bankruptcy courts have worked since 9/11 is a real mess. Too many seats, too few cheeks to reverse a saying at the reservations center where my wife works. As to who's subsidizing who, it gets real complicated. Amtrak got a hug influx of money out of the treasury and the treasury wrote 1000 year bonds to keep if off the books. The airlines have been paying into a trust fund for decades from a ticket tax that congress would spend everywhere else and write SS trust fund like IOUs back to the fund. If you want to have some real fund dig through that fund and see where it's money is today.