I'm fortunate enough to have only taken trains in places where there's an understanding that people actually... really actually do need to get to where they're going.

If your network doesn't have any sort of resilliance to failure, not much to do really.

(Aside: for the longest time I was always a bit miffed at France's train network, because it's mostly "go to Paris"/"move away from Paris" and very few sideways connections. Germany's transit map has always looked more evenly spread out! But every German I know who tries to take train transport complains about this lack of resiliance and now I'm pretty convinced that the network is too thinly spread out)