That's awesome if you're not interested in carrying people, but whether a network incapable of carrying people is "a decent rail network" is something many would dispute.

Also, Russia has ~44% of population of the US, yet it still outperforms the US in absolute terms? That's quite impressive for Russia in my book. Having said that, they've always been heavily dependent on rail to lower their transportation costs. Trucks and airplanes won't work for them nearly as well. So I'm not surprised if they're placed so high in rail freight ranking.

> The reason I'm skeptical of the numbers is that UP/US DoT reported 2.7T ton-KMs for 2018 [1].

I'm reading 1.7 on that page. Am I looking in the wrong place? It says "In 2018, 1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight (calculated by multiplying shipment weight in tons by the number of miles that it is transported) was shipped by rail, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation."

In Germany 20000 km are electrified, so around 25cm per inhabitant. In comparison to the NE corridor with a number of 1.5cm per inhabitant, this is a huge difference. To account for other railways inside the NE corridor, we can also just use all electrified rail as a reference and arrive at 3.7cm per inhabitant).

And Germany hasn't been great about electrifying it's rail.

Also, is there any statistics for this northeast corridor, regarding region area, electrified, and non-electrified rail length? I only know where to get national statistics, so that doesn't help me a lot here.