Why Europe's Freight Trains Are So Short — and America's Are Three Miles Long

If you stand at a railroad crossing somewhere in rural Kansas and wait for a Union Pacific freight train to pass, you might be standing there for a while. The locomotives come first, three or four diesel units pulling in formation, and behind them stretches a chain of double stacked container cars that disappears into the horizon. Two miles of train. Sometimes closer to three. The crossing gates stay down, the warning lights keep flashing, and the cars keep rolling past, one after another after another, for ten minutes or more.