The labor movement is a lot stronger in Europe than in the US. Their trains do fine with union workers. I suspect the differences are more likely to be in management practices (although of course different unions could behave differently.).
Great point about hamburgers from charts. Think of our discussions of boarding at Chicago. It's hard to say that a crew that decides to assign everyone a seat before they board the train is being lazy or offering poor service; they think -- correctly -- that that will get people into seats faster; and they've decided that getting groups together is more important than letting everyone choose a seat (a decision I know makes some people mad, but it is a decision). Think about dining car sittings (how many, exactly what times): while sometimes you might run into a crew that seems to be trying to repel customers, most of the variation seems to come from different crews having different ideas about how best to match up the passengers with the kitchen capacity. (Maybe even using 3 or 4 tables for staging salad dressing etc instead of for seating is part of a plan like that, or maybe that is a work-around for equipment that no longer fits the current use, or maybe it's lazy; who knows.) Add impulsive changes in OBS priorities that probably give the more conscientious employees whiplash and a large number of confused first-time passengers, fold in a few passengers who are rude or who have unreasonable expectations, and voila.
I wonder if another set of problems might come from tradition. For whatever reason -- habit, lack of imagination, old equipment, catering to nostalgia, union rules, expectations of loyal customers--Amtrak mostly runs 1950s premium trains with most of the amenities curtailed or removed, rather than 2000s trains with 2000s amenities. 1. Staffing stations is too expensive? Eliminate checked baggage from most trains, but still use cars that make handling big suitcases hard. Some countries instead have a self-service baggage section outside the pax area. (When I had a ski bag with me on the overnight from Trondheim to Bodø, Norway, the conductor helped me strap the bag into the ski section, and when we got off the bag was sitting on the platform for us to collect. Amtrak could do that, but doesn't.) 2. Cooking meals in a kitchen and washing dishes is too expensive? Serve inferior food on disposable plates in a half-used dining car; have wait staff who are generally nice people, but be sure that you don't make thoughtful service or attracting more dining customers a goal. In the cafe, serve expensive mediocre food in an unpleasant, industrial environment, and don't bother telling the pax on the train that either food option is available. Be sure to run out often. 3. Put off changing to electronic ticket collection/accounting for as long as possible. When you do, avoid assigned seats or any other ways that the electronics could make life easier for the customer. 4. Be sure to keep using cars with manual doors to make it hard to let pax off.
And then treat major station boarding like airplane boarding; never, ever copy the Japanese or the Europeans by putting up diagrams to tell people where to stand on the platform if they are in a particular car or going to a particular place.