European trains don't really do that much freight though. They tend to be optimized to carry people. America is actually way ahead of Europe in terms of rail freight, something like 10x depending on the measurement.
Having commuted with both american and german rail systems before, my educated guess it's likely due to who owns the rails. American rail freight companies have far more control over prioritization than european freight companies.
DB Netz owns the vast majority of german rail and therefore prioritizes what makes them the most money. Historically that's been carrying people due to all the government and company subsidies they get for supporting commuters and students. During COVID times the rail freight increased dramatically because the personen trains were offline. I suspect that will have generated some inertia towards freight, but it will take years to see and only if the right folks at DB crunch the right numbers.
On the american side, I've sat for 20 or 30 minutes regularly (up to an hour on the worst days) while our commuter train had to wait for the rail owner's freight train to roll through. And that's a regularly scheduled commuter!!
But why couldn't DB Netz do both people and freight, if both are profitable (after subsidies for passenger traffic)? i.e. why does it have to be a choice?
Because things which are designed to be good at one thing will not be as good at other things. There's only so much rail network and given a conflict either freight is a priority or passengers are. You can't have two number 1 priorities.
I'm pretty impressed with India opening dedicated freight corridors. It's double-track that is optimized for longer, heavier freight trains. It seems obvious that the different operational patterns of freight and passenger rail means they each should have their own tracks. The only thing they did "wrong" IMO was to have level crossings where cars & trucks can get hit by the trains.
They could but german rail is already ridiculously crowded when factoring in all the safety regulations. Automation on the speed control already lets them pack the lines pretty tightly, which may be one reason why they've removed so much rail already.
Germans, in my experience, tend to be pretty rational folks. As much as the public likes to ream the decision makers for poor choices while armed with the perfect clarity of hindsight, my guess is they've gotten to this point because all the other choices seemed worse at the time they considered them.
On high speed lines, you often can only run either one of those. Not only that freight trains are slower, but they often aren't allowed to use tunnels at the same time as high speed passengers trains. So on some of the most direct and modern tracks, freight can only be run at night.
Typically everyone does both freight and passengers, but it'll be better at one or the other. Passengers want fast trains with few delays that get close to population centers. Freight doesn't care about speed as much but cares about the overall throughput and wants to end up in distribution centers.
Anyway, about "distribution centers" - just have an optional turn when approaching some town, choosing between the central train station and the "distribution center" location. That in itself does not sound like much of an issue.
However, other comments suggest that freight needs _slow_ speed and must avoid tunnels. Maybe that's the reason?
I think they do. The Dutch railway definitely does. But a lot of freight is actually transported over rivers, which is very efficient. Though also still by trucks, sadly, which is not.
Russia is ahead of the US, even in absolute tonne-km terms. And I don't know about other EU countries, but we (Czech Republic) seem to be transporting almost exactly as many tonnes per capita per year as the US, despite the fact that we have mixed rail traffic. The US just wins on tonne-km since it's larger, so the average distances are larger as well. But purely the volume of freight seems to be about the same, despite heavy passenger traffic.
Back in 1996 Switzerland and Germany signed a non-binding agreement (Vertrag von Lugano) to increase the capacity for freight trains. Now in 2022 the Swiss part [0] with two 34km and 57km long tunnels through the Alps is basically finished meanwhile the German part is expected to be completed in 2042 [1]
In the Australian case, that percentage is heavily skewed by bulk freight of coal, iron ore, wheat, etc. That's often using dedicated tracks, direct from mines to ports, and not connected to the general freight network.
The mix of road and rail for more general freight has been heavily in favour of road for a long time, and only getting worse as Internet shopping, etc, increases the role of last-mile home delivery.
