Or rather, many of them.
Not in the sense of high-speed passenger rail, much less (shudder) Federally-financed high-speed passenger rail. Rather, this is private rail lines, servicing, wait for it —
new oil fields.
Ignore the title of the linked publication; I’ve been a subscriber for years, and it ain’t at all “progressive.” ;p
Sounds like pipe-dreaming to me. The idea of moving oil in large quantities by tank trains was dismissed over 60 years ago when it was found that even a modest-sized pipeline could carry FAR more oil than a fleet of trains. Small amount of oil can and do travel by tank car (and tanker truck), but the costs of loading and unloading largely negate the advantage of the steel wheel on the steel rail for moving commodities.
The other problem is environmental. Each car, or at least a section of 3-5 cars, has to be connected to other cars by a “trainline”, a central pipe system to fill/empty the cars. Each one of those connections have the potential of leaking a bit. Add up the leaks and pretty soon it adds up to a spill along the right-of-way.
For these reasons mostly, transporting large amounts of crude oil by train is not in the car(d)s.
BTW, I sort of keep up with rail news, and am reliably informed that none of the major rail corridors has enough excess capacity now to add large fleets of trains to it.