&gt; For long haul, you can just use trains.<p>RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don&#x27;t even need people on the locos in the yard anymore.<p>Not to mention that long-haul-via-rail is only viable in the US... in Europe, it virtually doesn&#x27;t exist anymore. It just isn&#x27;t profitable due to various external conditions:<p>1) train track pricing is prohibitively expensive<p>2) freight trains don&#x27;t get priority over passenger trains - quite the contrary. If you have any time-sensitive stuff, better transport it via road instead.<p>3) rail tracks are massively overbooked. One single delay and the entire system grinds to a screeching halt.<p>4) there is no such thing as cross-Europe locomotives&#x2F;conductors. There might be multi-system-capable locos, but there is not a single loco on the market able to serve the entire fragmented European railroad technology.<p>There may be &quot;just&quot; 15&#x2F;25 kV AC + 1k5&#x2F;3kV DC, but every country needs their own roof collectors because they&#x27;re NOT compatible (some countries don&#x27;t even have roof collectors, but 3rd rails or sideway rails for the low-voltage DC stuff, and the DC stuff usually doesn&#x27;t pack a lot of power so you can&#x27;t really use them for any heavy load), but the real tech problem is the load of bollocks called signalling&#x2F;security system, every country has their own, including Germany alone with FOUR popular systems (classic form signals, light-based signals, LZB&#x2F;PZB and ETCS, in addition to various customizations in Eastern Germany and the S-Bahn tracks).<p>Not to mention the conductors which have to know all the signalling systems AND all the languages (compared to aviation where English is the standard worldwide), and they need to be expensively re-certified...<p>Yeah, ETCS, I hear you, but ETCS is a joke that would require literally hundreds of billions to retrofit across the major transit routes in Europe, but that won&#x27;t happen - we Europeans haven&#x27;t even managed to get our freight carriages to silent brakes yet!<p>5) There are still restrictions like maximum train lengths and the plain fact that European freight carriages only carry a pneumatic line for the brakes, but no data lines for controlling middle&#x2F;back locos - so there&#x27;s no technical way of extending train lengths because there&#x27;s simply no loco combo capable of pulling &gt;700m length heavy freight carriages with 3 locos on the front and no way to control a pushing loco in the back of the train. Simple physics, the good old screw coupling just can&#x27;t support more load. There are alternatives (C-AKv coupling, it&#x27;s high load AND compatible with the old coupling) but once again a retrofit would cost billions (see #4)...<p>Trains might be more efficient from an environmental and human-resources POV, but they&#x27;re fucked up on any economic scale - and politicians all over Europe don&#x27;t give a single fuck, instead they are all letting their rail systems rot to pieces and squeeze every tiny penny from the rail companies to fix up their even more rotten state budgets!