This is my take on things. Usually I know when I'm full of crap, but not always, so read this at your own risk and take it for what it's worth:
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In the U.S., freight railroads are private entities and have to cover all their own costs out of revenues and generate sufficient profits to keep stockholders interested.
They're in competition with truckers, who benefit greatly by taxpayer subsidies to the interstate highway system. Truckers are losing some of their competitive edge as fuel costs rise, because trucks use much more fuel per ton-mile of freight hauled than do railroads.
Before interstate highways and the dominance of big trucks, railroads ran shorter freight trains, ran them more frequently, and often ran them faster, especially in the flat, open terrain of the midwest. With smaller trains and more frequent trips, they were able to pump a lot of tonnage through freight yards that were small by comparison with today's yards.
Likewise, passenger trains ran more frequently and often with fewer cars than now. Instead of the consists of 14 cars or so that Amtrak runs on some long-distance routes, with coaches and sleeping cars all mixed together, they ran frequent coach trains that served multiple on-line cities, and limiteds often made up of a few sleeping cars, a parlor-lounge and a diner, that stopped only at major cities. Double- or even triple- or quadruple track on high-traffic segments made it possible for them to run all that traffic and reliably maintain tight schedules.
Now, the railroads emphasize cost containment in order to maintain profitability, and that results in practices like running mile-long freights with multiple engines and one crew. Those trains take a long time to get rolling and a long time to get stopped, and except in the sparsely-populated areas of the West where some freights really fly, most of the freight traffic doesn't move very fast. The railroads have had to expand yards or build massive new ones to handle the big trains, and former passenger station concourses have been razed to provide clearance for bigger freight cars and double-stack containers.
The MBAs in the corporate headquarters have tried to show immediate benefits of the many mergers and acquisitions by quickly shedding what they felt was redundant or excess capacity, including double track, parallel routes and seasonally-surplus rolling stock. That has resulted in paralyzing shortages of cars during grain harvest, choking congestion as freight traffic has grown, and insufficient motive power on some roads to move the traffic.
There's a growing awareness of the rail capacity problem and a new effort to restore double-tracking on some of the critical routes where it no longer exists, and there's renewed interest in expanding capacity to accomodate effective passenger service that can maintain reasonable schedules.
Sustainable long-term change will only come when the country seeks and finds/creates a balanced solution to a national transportation system and does away with the current system where separate entities controlling highway, rail, air and water transport all pursue their individual short-term ROI numbers.
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Sorry about that. You were warned.
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