Arguably, freight trains in North America are more advanced than Europe. They’ve had automatic couplers for a long time, they have a huge loading gauge allowing

Arguably, freight trains in North America are more advanced than Europe. They’ve had automatic couplers for a long time, they have a huge loading gauge allowing double stack freight, they have trains that can be miles long (compared to Europe which is working on a sub-network allowing 700m). The big difference is really the infrastructure and the ownership structure. Since the infrastructure is private and being competed on, it’s not shared across operators. It’s not a public utility and consequently in a sort of optimal state of minimal spending. Anyway, the story is much more complicated than „early adopters“.