I am just having a hard time wrapping my arms around what issue they are trying to solve. Same for any "inter-city" passenger service in Maine.
The issue is that people see disused railroad tracks in their town and think that entitles them to passenger rail service, and when that service doesn't materialize, they think their town is being deliberately ignored in favor of the other towns/cities that have passenger rail service.
I've seen and heard it in the comments/statements from politicians and residents over the past 20 years — statements like "it's not fair that Portland has passenger trains and [random small town] doesn't," "our town has tracks, why can't we have a train," "we deserve to have the same things Portland has," etc.
In many cases it really is as petty and juvenile as that. They prove how uninformed they are when they try to make a point by saying, for example, "Wells has a population of 11,000 and they get a passenger train; we have a population of 18,000 and we don't get a passenger train. How is that fair?" — totally oblivious to the fact that Wells is located on the mainline to Boston (so Portland-Boston trains are already passing through), whereas their town is located on an abandoned branch that would cost $200 million to rebuild... to say nothing of the fact that Wells is a huge tourist destination and their town isn't. They see some rusty hundred-year-old 85 lb rails sitting on top of sawdust ties with date nails from before WWII and cinder ballast, and they think the service should magically appear within a year because they demanded it.