Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[danbrotherston]

Again, that explains why the shippers and logistics people are not being stupid when they use trucks.

None of that in any way explains how it makes sense to have thousands of trucks all individually travelling through the US at the same time with one driver per load rather than collecting hundreds of them together and having two people drive them as a train.

It's probably more efficient to just pay truckers to truck stuff for the whole journey rather than pay one trucker to drive it to a depot, then pay more people to load/unload trains, then pay more at the other rail depot, then pay again for loading/unloading, then pay another trucker to do the last leg of the journey. There's also the cost of the time it takes to do all this, and railways are going to wait until they have a really long train to reduce their labour costs as low as possible. I know that road travel in North America is subsidized a lot differently than it is in other parts of the world so that explains the shift away from rail, along with the "containerization" of freight that makes shipping anything less than a container much less practical for smaller companies and/or different destinations.

The rail network in North America is the best freight rail network in the world and it's optimized to move the stuff that makes the most sense to move by rail: large volumes of bulk cargo like iron ore, coal, lumber, finished automobiles, steel coils, etc. as well as intermodal containers and anything that isn't time-sensitive. Trucks are good for the last mile and stuff that doesn't go into sea-cans.

Europe moves more freight by road than it does by rail. They use their rail network for more passenger service but from what I've seen they still have traffic jams on their highways... anyone that's driven the autobahn has seen the permanent signs for "stau" that light up when traffic jams up.

It's only more "economical" (we aren't talking 'efficiency' here at all) because of economic choices, if truck drivers were paid more, this would easily change.

I believe WRT Europe you mean that they move a lower percentage of their freight ton-miles by railway than we do.  I'm not sure either continent moves the majority of freight ton-miles by rail, but I'm not really sure.