Freight trains in the US are close to 3 miles long. Similar freight trains in Europe are more like half a mile long. Long-haul trains in the US, carrying standard shipping containers, are typically double stacked using specially-designed well cars. The bridges and tunnels in Europe simply do not have the vertical clearance, and the weight-bearing capacity to manage that.
Also, rail in Europe is typically owned by government, and it is optimized around passenger traffic. Freight gets the leftovers.
All this means that rail, carrying freight, in the US is much more efficient, economically and environmentally, than rail in Europe. That is the amount of fuel used per mile of cargo is much better in the US than it is in Europe.
The fuel cost per ton mile drops as the train gets longer because the locomotives are already burning diesel to move their own weight.
Locomotives use the most fuel when starting a train from rest. (A body in motion wants to remain in motion.) So when you can double stack containers, on trains that are nearly 3 miles long, and run them non-stop for a 1000 miles, as opposed to having to wait for passenger trains to get out of the way in every other town, the efficiency improves a lot.
This is the Steel on Rails video Why Europe's Freight Trains Are So Short — and America's Are Three Miles Long
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