Historical reason: the rails were built by freight companies and not by the government like in most of Europe. For them, passenger trains are, at best, an afterthought that doesn't matter.
> 4730 m – United States — The Kansas City Southern Railway regularly runs between Kansas City, MO and Shreveport, LA
> 3658 m – United States – Trains are limited by air brake capability. electronically controlled pneumatic braked (180 wagons) – AAR Standard S-4200.[15]
Meanwhile, ordinary German trains are limited to 740m (Europe wide/UIC limit: 750m) and single-stack operation because of overhead power lines.
On the other side, the US has a lot of space that can be devoted to something like classification yards - the longer the train, the longer the yards have to be.
The other thing to note is that the freights are shorter and more frequent, rather than the 200+-car monstrosities we have in the States (made possible by remotely-controlled diesels mid-train or pushing).
https://www.railfreightforward.eu/sites/default/files/userco...
"Maintaining its current modal share of 18% will pose a challenge for the rail freight sector due to three main factors: an expected change of goods structure, general logistic trends and the high intensity of road innovation."
Railways are poor at moving freight in Europe due to:
a) Sharing tracks with high speed passenger trains, which makes scheduling complicated
b) Lack of agility compared to trucks which can go anywhere, change their routes at the drop of a hat, can turn up and leave at any time you wish.
c) Being government subsidised, often nationalised, there's no innovation anywhere, nobody cares, all the usual problems of socialised infrastructure. Trucking is entirely privatised with many small firms instead of a tiny number of government run firms, so is more customer focused.
1) our train length is limited - see the parallel comment. UIC limits our trains to 750m top, we don't have the space required for train yards that can handle longer trains, and the signal blocks are too short apart to handle trains longer than that (basic railway safety, a train must always have enough free space in front so that it can brake from full speed to zero in case of crossing a red light without crashing into the train in front). US trains run in multiple kilometers of length, so they have vastly greater capacity.
2) our car height is limited because our networks are largely electrified which means you can't double stack containers on them
3) our infrastructure is densely packed which means that you can't just run a train uplink to a random warehouse, and for those industries that do have a train uplink, the shunting required is expensive (need to maintain locomotives and trained drivers, which are in rare supply compared to truck drivers).
> Being government subsidised, often nationalised, there's no innovation anywhere, nobody cares, all the usual problems of socialised infrastructure
WTF? That's just flat out wrong and ideological. There is no real innovation anywhere in railways, the only thing that the US makes different is that freight trains are prioritized and longer, but that's hardly innovative (and again, as Europe is smaller and denser, impossible to replicate).
With smaller innovations (I'd call these "improvements") the situation looks different - e.g. the digitalization of train control aka ETCS, automated couplers, more efficient/silent braking systems... the tech exists, vendors exist - but good luck getting all the private freight companies to on-board to that new tech, as they don't want to bear the cost of progress! That, and solely that, is why Europe is still stuck with screw couplers and dumb freight carriages.
As for the innovation thing, the report I quoted literally says they can't keep up with road innovation. It doesn't say there are no new ideas in railways ever, but, who in SBB or DB is really going to go the extra mile to fight for some cool new idea? Truck firms are far smaller and there are way more of them, so people can conceivably get ahead by doing things differently (doesn't need to be tech innovation).
Germany has enough of them to fill a couple pages: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Eisenbahngesel...
The vast majority is handled by state-owned DB Cargo though: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/568662/umfrag...
> It doesn't say there are no new ideas in railways ever, but, who in SBB or DB is really going to go the extra mile to fight for some cool new idea?
And... what should these be, ETCS and automated couplers aside? The vast majority of truck innovation are related to electrification (which most major European rail corridors are already, and the last mile can be handled by the new dual power locomotives) and driver assistance (autonomous driving, dead spot detectors, emergency automated brakes, driver cab comfort).
> Truck firms are far smaller and there are way more of them, so people can conceivably get ahead by doing things differently
Yeah, they cheat on the safety rules, and enjoy that every business has a road connection while very few businesses have a rail connection so it's easier to do computer assisted magic in scheduling.
In US rail companies aren't exactly known for innovation either, because of extreme distances they haul and already efficient diesel-electric locomotives - there's no practical pressures to innovate at all.
There are multiple reasons why rail traffic in Europe and US is different, but none of it is because "socialism".
As an example, in 2016 I took the train from New York to Montreal. The distance is only about 600 km, but the train ride took almost 12 hours! Part of that was due to the border checks of course, but even during the part in the States the train tucked along really slowly and had to stop multiple times to let cargo trains pass (which have priority over passenger trains it seems). In Europe, I also regularly took the train from Saarbrücken to Paris, which is not that different in terms of distance (around 500-550 km depending how you count) and takes just 1 hour 45 minutes.
The great thing about Switzerland is their 30 minute schedule btw: Trains are scheduled so they arrive around 5 minutes before half in all major train stations, and depart around 5 minutes after half again, so that you can hop from one train to another with less than 10 minutes delay (and trains are on time in Switzerland). They're already planning to change those intervals to 15 minutes, which would basically turn Switzerland into one giant metropolitan area, with train schedules that feel more like subway connections.