That is correct. America actually has a remarkable freight rail system. But the vast majority of Americans are not involved directly with freight rail so most people don't think about it.
I think in most of Europe there's a relatively painful 50/50 balance between passenger and freight traffic. The freight trains run mostly at night. The tracks are used really, really hard, which causes maintenance issues.
It's quite hard to do track maintenance well when there's a train passing by every 5-10 minutes, 24/7. Maintenance windows can become really expensive.
