And the reason that Amtrak doesn’t offer the car carrier north of the DC area is that the tunnels in the Northeast are too low. (The car carrier carriages are taller than the ones used for passenger service.)
I’ve worked in factories in Sweden and Texas that had tracks inside so trains could come in to load and offload. The products one of them loaded were always liquid; loading the train wasn’t much different from loading a tanker truck.
Seen car factories with tracks in them, and trains loaded with cars. Again the wagons don’t look much different from the trailer on a car-carrying truck.
I don’t know if it’s still possible, but RENFE used to offer the possibility to send a package by paying for it, giving it to the train chief, and have someone pick it up at the destination. I expect there will be barcode readers involved nowadays.
Our tale of Amtrak shipping. Sent a nice item. Took out insurance for it for $X. Never showed up. We filed an insurance claim. They wanted proof (sales slip which was no more) that it was bought new for $X and was still worth $X and a bunch of other stuff. Umm, the $X amount was what was suggested by their own clerk! Plus they later wanted proof the item was actually shipped (umm, the copies of all that are part of the original claim, it was recorded in their system) and on and on. Basically trying to wear us down so we’d give up. A real hassle.
I thought the deal with all shipping insurance was that if you insured something for $X and it got lost, you got $X regardless of content. The premium sets the payout.
“Sure, Ethel, you insured Fred’s life for one million dollars, but we don’t think Fred was really worth that. Could you please provide receipts, etc.?”