Chatting with a reporter at a rail freight planning conference in Brussels last week, Kuhla said something had hit him: Twenty years ago, European railroads were clearly superior to their U.S. counterparts in hauling freight. In fact, he and other European rail officials traveled to the United States to advise then-troubled U.S. railroads on how to win back at least part of the freight business that was quickly being lost to trucks.

What a difference 20 years can make. U.S. railroads are in the midst of a traffic boom that is straining their ability to haul the loads, are more profitable than at any time since the boom years of World War II and for the first time in decades are gaining market share against trucks. After three years of major growth, stunned U.S. railroad officials are beginning to believe that the rail industry is in its first truly significant high-growth period in 65 years.

Europe? Well, that's a different story. In the industrial core of the EU, only France and Germany handle any significant amount of freight. But their haulage pales in comparison with that of trucks - only about 15 percent of the total.

In the United States, railroads hauled 25 percent of the freight tonnage in 2001, the last year for which statistics are available. The two figures are not directly comparable, however, because the U.S. statistics also include pipelines and barges.

There seems to be little hope that the European situation will improve soon despite the EU's push to shift freight off Europe's overcrowded highways and onto rail.

The reasons for the U.S. success and the European malaise are many, and some make a fascinating study of contrasting government attitudes that go beyond the obvious: that Europe loves and nurtures intercity passenger trains, while the United States has few of them outside the Washington-Boston corridor.

Years ago, the EU forced state-owned railroads to split their management in two - setting up operating groups to run the trains and infrastructure groups to handle access to rail lines, allowing private companies fair access to the tracks to compete for freight.

European railroad main lines are almost all run with electric traction rather than expensive, polluting fossil fuels, so railroads are the darlings of the "green" movements throughout Europe. All the stars seem to be in alignment for a massive shift of freight to rail. The political climate could not be better.

But this shift just isn't happening. There are some success stories among the fledgling private freight haulers and state-owned companies but not enough to make the slightest impact on highway congestion.

Robert Watson, a British rail consultant, said the EU may well have had an adverse effect on the rail system while trying to help it.

"Open access has destabilized the European railroad environment," Watson said.

"This is going to be a tough time to get through," he said.

Conference participants seemed to agree that European railroads are not handling the forced change well. There seems to be a lot of confusion among managers and a tendency in many ways to resist. Railroads are large, ponderous organizations that do not react well to sudden change.

On the other hand, the U.S. government is largely ignoring all freight transportation, particularly freight railroads. That was not true in the 1960s and 1970s, when railroads were tightly regulated. But the government's attitude changed in 1969 when the huge Penn Central Railroad went bankrupt and Congress saw the frightening possibility that the government might have to nationalize the railroads.

A decade later, after the Penn Central was reorganized into a leaner and more competitive Conrail, and almost all railroad regulation was junked, the industry began to grow healthier and more competitive. Today, the freight rail system is almost too successful to fit its infrastructure, which is almost entirely owned by the railroads.

Meanwhile, despite flowing political speeches on highway spending, the U.S. road system is sinking toward gridlock in many populated areas. The U.S. government does spend billions of dollars on highways, but much of that is for maintenance and some small expansion of the current system.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta is also spending a lot of time trying to reorganize the passenger rail system, Amtrak, which is insignificant as a means of moving people outside the Washington-NewYork-Boston corridor. It is almost as if the U.S. government is staging a version of the burning of Rome, playing a fiddle while the road system burns.

This attitude has been a great help to the U.S. railroad system. With highways growing more crowded, the cost of trucking rising rapidly and the government leaving the system alone, the freight rail system is thriving.

The U.S. railroad system was bogged down for decades under government controls, so badly that a government bailout was necessary. But then the government pulled out, and it thrived. There are many differences between U.S. and European systems - EU railroads operate masses of passenger trains and U.S. railroads do not, and hauls are longer in the United States, among others - that do not facilitate neat either-or solutions. But there may be at least a lesson in the U.S. government's laissez-faire attitude worth considering for Europe as it moves forward.

Don Phillips can be reached at freeflow@iht.com