Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech. What it needs is to be able to travel everywhere at high throughput and cheaply. US is doing quite well in that regard.
The US used to have much more tracks, but the private railroads stripped a lot of them as far as they could get away with. There are lines that were four-tracked or were electrified that have now been reduced to unelectrified single track, so you now have a much more sluggish, polluting and congested railroad, and on top of that much is poorly maintained to save money.
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Also a lot of the freight is bulk freight like coal. This has led to some interesting dynamics where freight railroads oppose coal plant closures, because they will lose a major source of tonnage.
That depends on what you want to ship. In the US the train just gave up on many other class of freight. Yes, large scale slow bulk transport doesn't need speed, other things might.
Have you seen the USA? The places where they lack track sensors are basically out in the middle of nowhere with no one around for miles.
> One of the most lucrative rail systems in the US had an average speed of their trains in the single digits MPH!
That really isn't bad for freight. They optimize freight for throughput, not latency (something passenger rail is more concerned with).
And there are plenty of latency sensitive applications for freight rail which are developed in other places. They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it.
There really isn't. Freight companies are responsible for maintaining investing in the rail, and if it doesn't make them money, they aren't going to put it there. Heck, a lot of places are single rail (meaning, no two way traffic at the same time), because it doesn't really make sense to dump more money into an extra set of tracks in those places.
The correct approach is for low latency rail freight to operate on passenger rail systems which already have the necessary speeds and flexibilities. This is structurally unfeasible in the US but it's still definitely a market that better rail systems can service at no extra cost.
And actually, sharing tracks between passenger and freight service is something that they don't really do in Europe. Because they share tracks, American passenger trains have to build at a weight on part with freight trains. Most lines in Europe separate out passenger and freight service lines so they can run lighter trains for passenger service.
Low latency freight for smaller, high value items is often done on passenger lines (or even passenger trains) because it doesn't put any scheduling pressure on passenger service.
As far as use of freight in Europe, the elephant in the room is that the EU uses a lot more sea freight than the US. Indeed, while the modal split for EU trucking is around 50%, it's around 70% in the US, and it thus seems clear that the real reason that there is less rail shipping within Europe is because there is much more competition from maritime shipping.
And since trucking capacity has been maxed out in the US for quite a while (Amazon is the big mover for this situation, even before covid), you can bet this path dependence is biting us now.
Happens a lot in Switzerland.
Just because it works doesn't mean it can't be improved better. It's always ok to reject the "don't fix it if it's not broken" mentality.
US rail owners and operators know what the variables are that they care about and their customers care about are, and also what insurance companies care about and as a result, they are adept at moving goods coast to Great Lakes to coast, across the Appalachians, Missouri-Mississippi river system, the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades and the California Coastal Range.
If they’re not using some software package or have complete sensor coverage on their tracks, they probably judged that they don’t need it. If a competitor actually finds advantage with these things tomorrow, then they will all adopt it.
The US is perfect for rail - lots of long trips, with lots of goods. It could probably have more market share if goods could move more quickly and flexibly.
US: 45% road, 38% rail, 17% other (water/pipeline)
France: 75% road, 15% rail, 10% other
Germany: 62% road, 25% rail, 18% other
Spain: 92% road, 4% rail, 4% other
EU: 76% road, 19% rail, 5% other
[1] https://stats.oecd.org/BrandedView.aspx?oecd_bv_id=trsprt-da...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
The fact is the us could do better, pointing to Europe which could also do better is moot.
GP asked for a well founded data-based argument, assuming they don't actually want that is in bad faith.
I agree with GP that the connection between sensors and high speed to better freight rail is tenuous, whereas large amounts of tonnage moved more clearly indicates good freight rail.