[jcranmer]

The railroads generally weren't broken up. Instead, they faced heavy regulation, especially in regards to setting prices and passenger routes. Post-WW2, the passenger traffic collapsed due to airlines and highway traffic, while the regulator generally required railroads to continue running money-losing routes.

The Pennsylvania RR's merger with New York Central in the 70s proved to be a disaster. The result of the Penn Central bankruptcy was the removal of several of regulations, and the transfer of passenger traffic to local commuter rail agencies and Amtrak. Freight companies consolidated like mad afterwards, ending up with what are now 7 major railroads (UP, BNSF, CSX, NS, CP, CN, KCS), and they invested in intermodal and double-stacked container freight, which is why the US has better freight traffic than Europe.

[mschuster91]

> and they invested in intermodal and double-stacked container freight, which is why the US has better freight traffic than Europe.

The US has the scale both financially and in terms of sheer area that makes freight traffic work well and profitable. In Europe, you have a lot of things making rail expensive - there's infrastructure like bridges or tunnels everywhere which means you can't double-stack, and there's millennia worth of villages and cities that you have to build around.

Add to that that most US freight is done with diesel-fueled locomotives which means that the US saved a lot of the money that Europe spent on electrification.

[jabl]

A problem in Europe is also that rail freight tends to be more competitive the longer the distance, but European railways are national carriers concentrating on in-country operations. To the point that for inter-country traffic is dominated by trucking.

The EU has been trying to fix it by imposing common signaling standards, opening access etc. but it's slow going as all the national operators lobby hard to protect their home turfs.

[mschuster91]

> The EU has been trying to fix it by imposing common signaling standards, opening access etc.

That's not much of a problem any more with the advent of multi-system locomotives - you can go from the Netherlands (=Rotterdam port, central entry for Chinese-origin container ships) to Italy with a single Siemens ES64F4 VE locomotive, for example. All that's needed is regular exchange of the operating staff.

The real problem rather is that European railways are built with "passenger first" in mind, which means that during the day freight trains get set aside and during the night capacities are limited because of (very valid, fwiw) noise complaints.

The US prioritizes freight trains first, and there are not many complaints of noise because the trains are in rural areas with no human (or protected animal) closer than a dozen kilometers.