At one time, there was. (And still is in Asia). The idea was to buy up undeveloped land, build a train line to it, develop a whole new city, and then sell it off in parcels.
It seems we stopped doing this in North America when highways took over.
Just to name one example of this, in Bangkok the BTS Skytrain[0] is expanding pretty fast, and even though it's expensive to ride it's the only way around the awful traffic if you work downtown, ergo it's packed during commute hours. (There's an underground too, which is also expanding, but it doesn't go as far out.)
High-rise apartment complexes go up pretty fast too, when a new station gets built. Coming from the West, it's fascinating to watch: an area that would normally be somewhat insular, suddenly becomes a viable bedroom community for people who work downtown, and then there's a rush to get in on the relatively cheap real estate, and night markets open up for your after-work entertainment, and so on. All within a couple years.
OTOH there's massive oversupply in these high-rise complexes, so I'm not sure about the business dynamic for the developers, other than the fact that a lot of money is still desperately seeking a parking space outside the PRC
The US government actually tried this explicitly. For a lot of land out west they gave every other parcel to the railroads for free, on the premise the railroad company would then make things boom, and they’d both profit.
It mostly didn’t work out that way, and it is a key reason a lot of the parks and native land reservations have a bunch of dumb isolated parcels that no one can get to.
It does seem it would make more sense near a city with some existing transit today you could add to. I do know the MTA has used real estate to subsidize a few projects like the Fulton St transit center, but less so for entire new lines.
If you just build a railroad and sell off parcels you aren't doing any development, nor anything that tech bros can use to slide into the industry. Actual development involves a lot of heavy earthwork, drainage plans, development of water and sewer networks, maybe road planning, fire hydrants, etc etc.
Just buying and selling land isn't development.
Railroad companies control where we build railroads and they are conservative after decades of closing unprofitable lines. This is not the wild west.
As I mentioned in the GGGP comment, they don't just build the railroad; they develop most of the parcels before they sell them off. Several buildings they do not sell; they for example tend to build shopping malls, hotels, and apartment complexes directly around the station, and hold onto those, leasing them out to businesses, or operate them themselves. Railroad companies in Asia are much less conservative than in the West, where they mostly have shed all their business except slow freight.
then those companies are not scaling up in tech bro style with a minimum viable product and looking to sell services, they're laying out tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on real property and construction before making any back. They're not tech bros and they're not doing what they do through tech. You aren't going to beat them with this one cool AI trick you discovered in an LLM. They have people on the ground moving millions of tons of earth, designers working years in advance to plan all of this, applications to government for approval etc.
This isn't "magic construction sauce" that allowed them to do it. Its massive amounts of money, labour, time effort like every other construction company. You won't disrupt them if you aren't better at their business than they are.
It seems we stopped doing this in North America when highways took over.