If we lose the railways we shall not just have lost a valuable practical asset whose replacement or recovery would be intolerably expensive. We shall have acknowledged that we have forgotten how to live collectively. If we throw away the railway stations and the lines leading to them —as we began to do in the 1950s and 1960s— we shall be throwing away our memory of how to live the confident civic life.

It is not by chance that Margaret Thatcher —who famously declared that “there is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”— made a point of never traveling by train. If we cannot spend our collective resources on trains and travel contentedly in them it is not because we have joined gated communities and need nothing but private cars to move between them. It will be because we have become gated individuals who don’t know how to share public space to common advantage.

The implications of such a loss would far transcend the demise of one system of transport among others. It would mean we had done with modern life.

Tony Judt, 2011

(from Bring Back the Rails! published January 2011 in the NY Review of Books, and cited here.