I'm surprised at this board. Government involvement always makes things worse. How is this even up for debate?
To be fair that is highly subjective especially on the subject of railroads as this crisis wasn't solely the responsibility of the government doing too much or too little nor was Norfolk Southern guiltless either.
Most rail failures of the past century aren't due to regulation but the fact that some regulations enable shenanigans by already greedy and incompetent management leading to more shenanigans.
Does anybody here know why PennCentral failed in the 70's? Why AmTrack and Conrail came into existence? The answer is government intervention, bad regulations, incompatible mergers greed, incompetence and a whole host of other issues.
Also, as someone who recently looked into, I can't recommend enough looking up videos on the absolute tire fire that was the Penn Central Railroad.
Its a sight to behold a sign that despite how bad East Palestine was it can always be worse...
In short, the reason Consolidated Rail or Conrail was founded was because a mix of problems the Penn Central would have been a troublesome rail line enough but The Government taking forever to finalize the merger leaving doubts as if to it would even happen and forcing all railroads in the U.S. to maintain a passenger service despite them being a money sink didn't help.
Ironically when the Government was forced to bail out Penn Central and establish Conrail it forced them to realize how outdated many of the old regulations were when they got forced to actually run a damn railroad rather than pretend they knew how it worked, that is why all passenger services were handed over to Amtrack among other things so rather than being a sinkhole for the railroads it became one for the U.S. government.