As for Albania, you know how to pick the one part of Europe where train service is crap - anything from Bosnia southeastwards in http://emptypipes.org/supp/isochrone_zagreb/. Pretty much any other direction is perfectly serviceable and vastly better connected. Apparently you can get sooner to Paris from Zagreb by train that to any of Albania. Is the US west coast due to its geography a similar uniquely bad place?
The US west is mostly empty. When you look at the article’s map even the named places are tiny. La Junta is tiny. Flagstaff is less than 100,000 as a metro. Reno is about half a million. Cheyenne is in Wyoming. The entire state has fewer than a million people.
In terms of European rail travel, I avoided the low hanging fruit like Dublin to Lisbon, Reykjavík to London, or Oslo to Paris.
Quite simply it runs along the best available route. Down the Willamette Valley to Eugene and then...well it has to make do past Mount Shasta until near Sacramento.
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I'm not going to express faux outrage at the shortcomings of European rail based on the lack of service to Triana. Rather it is to point out that in this sort of discussion of US passenger rail, Europeans tend to ignore a great deal of Europe. More understandable is the misunderstanding of US geography, even in the US people presume similar political geography implies similar physical geography.
Finally, Oakland to Portland is not a major passenger route. Not really even a major rail route since the sea is a viable alternative for freight along the coast and most freight in the US travels east-west.