The federal government buys up railroad rights-of-way (and adds to them), and then sells rail time to commercial and private operators similar to how the FAA sells access to skyways and terminals.

This can initially get freight off the interstate system in autonomous hauling units and eventually expand to passenger service.

When operators are free to innovate in the manner freight operators for surface roads/waterways are rail can modernize more quickly and adapt to new markets.

There is in fact a natural, strong, and straightforward “conservative case for” almost every kind of state subsidy, transfer, infrastructure, or primarily economic program which is at least marketed at helping otherwise decent and hardworking members of “the struggle is real” class, which is probably about half the population from just above lumpenprole to the lower upper middle class. That’s part of why there’s always a constant stream of “the conservative case for” things we usually associate with the progressive left, not just because those authors are desperately trying to get some “strange new respect” from the progressives, but because the arguments are easy to express in ideologically coherent ways.

The trouble is that this is completely distinct from realistically plausible ways, when the conservative case plan makes contact with the bureaucratic enemy. All these authors can argue a conservative case for an ideal and imaginary version of the thing, but not for the actual thing as it will likely be implemented in realty, which all sane and savvy observers know it’s going to fall so short of the ideal, you can’t even see the ideal from there. There’s public transportation as it could be in heaven or, like, the not too distant past, and then there’s the actual misery of sharing your bus or metro ride with noisy troublemakers, beggars and stinking bums, sometimes crazy and/or intoxicated.

“The conservative case” for anything — indeed, for government itself — turns out to be the case for the version of that thing that would exist if it were of conservatives, by conservatives, for conservatives.