> it's still in the middle of the pack when measured by track per person or track per area
Both of those seem like somewhat irrelevant metrics. Why should a more densely populated country be penalized for having larger clusters of people compared to (based on this data) Canada or Russia? On the other end, why should a country with large swaths of unpopulated land cover it with rail to improve its track per area metric, which densely populated countries seem to do well on?
It may be more useful to consider the efficiency and cost of freight rail, as well as the share of freight transit (per unit of distance, for instance) that is on rail.
They're not perfect, but they seem useful to me: roughly how much stuff per mile is on your rails, and how far do you have to travel to reach it? Do you have some cost per mile figures to share?
Yeah, the US rail system is the best in the world for freight. In other countries, passenger rail has priority, so the freight service suffers a bit. In the US, it's the other way around.
It sucks for passengers but that's not relevant to this discussion.