The track is unprofitable (legacy maintenance) and had to be brought back into public ownership for safety reasons. The staff are shuffled between various paper-thin "franchise" employers. The one profitable bit is train leasing; the privatization created ROSCOs, which are train landlords, who get the real profits from public subsidy.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/18/profits-of-...
Having sold a fairly sophisticated and expensive financial product with nasty downside risks to lots of states and cities, Wall Street then went on to rig the underlying number: https://www.reuters.com/legal/ten-big-banks-settle-us-intere... (although market conditions since the financial crisis would have caused the buyers to lose money anyway)
The only legitmate ways you justify cutting public transit is
1. a superior form of transit has been established for a while
2. Literally no one is using the transit for whatever reason (which is nearly impossible)
3. mass extinction occurs and there's no one left to transit (though at that point transit is the least of our issues)
It's not supposed to be a direct profit. You Transport people around to businesses to sell to, work to operate the city with, and overall stimulate the economy.