I would recommend reading Daniel Boorstin's book, The Americans: The Democratic Experience.

https://www.amazon.com/Americans-Democratic-Experience-Danie...

There are fascinating chapters about how the combination of railroads, mail-order catalogs, rural-free delivery of USPS, and chain stores like A&P successively wiped out local merchants in small town America in favor of distant economic centers.

The debates they had about those technologies and economic models are almost identical to the debates that have raged about Wal-Mart and later Amazon in my lifetime.

The most useful railroad would be a single national rail network. Large network operators can refuse to interconnect or exchange traffic with small networks. When you’re small you want interoperability and FRAND tariffs to access the big networks. When you’re big you want to charge high rates, tie your other services with the dominant one, and sometimes refuse service to pressure small competitors into merging with you.

I think the point is about the era before railroads, which is also the era before personal automobiles.

Cars are post-railroad. It can be true that car-centric places are less interesting, while it is also true that the railroad killed local culture.