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So short of reclaiming areas via eminent domain and re-purposing them (wasteful since you're demolishing established structures), you're left with an either/or choice.

Sometimes opportunities present themselves. When the Southern Pacific (now Union Pacific) built a new yard in Roseville, railroad traffic through Silicon Valley was significantly reduced from hundreds of trains to several per day. Caltrain took over the San Jose yard to better support expanded service between San Francisco and Gilroy. The county expanded the light rail line along the right of way from San Jose to Campbell to form the Winchester line. Several right of ways are being re-purposed as landscaped corridors for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Exactly, however the build time, often takes days, for any given especially where non-perishable goods are being shipped.

You might have feeder lines coming in from regional hubs, ports, mining, manufacturing centers to a train yard, for assembly into a trans continental train, and each of these loads has different destinations. So the train is built for ease of disassemble, so that entire segments can be dropped along the way. Putting the closest destinations last on the line of rail cars, so they can just be disconnected when you reach your first stop, and maybe others tacked on.

But that is not the only consideration. You have to consider weight distribution along the train, You can't necessarily put a long slug of very light empty flat cars between longer much heaver materials cars. The light cars can be pulled off the track in certain cornering situations.

Train building is all done according to computer generated assembly lists. And if yard engineers are very lucky every segment is found on a specified track, in the proper order, but they often need to move other cars just to get to the segment they want. In large yards like The Bailey Yard that segment could be many miles away by rail, but only 500 yards away as the crow flys. Each trim up and down the yard can take half an hour. Google maps view: you will have to zoom both In and Out to comprehend the scale of this yard. These yards are everywhere.

IANATE, but I play one at work. You don't STEER a train/tram, but someone does control the alignment of the switches that govern the route. In large train networks, it's usually the central dispatcher.

It sounds as if the switches were controlled by some sort of wireless communication between the tram engineer's cab and the switch machine. The derailment was probably caused when the switch moved before the train cleared the switch. The front cars followed one path while the back car followed another. Eventually something gave way and the last car derailed.

Shut the fuck up.

Passenger trains have priority over freight on BNSF rail. The only exceptions are the guaranteed loads we carry between Thanksgiving and Christmas. UP on the other hand...

rails are still disappearing

Not quite -- I did a gig for these guys and they were building out new routes as quickly as they could (which, considering that they had to secure right-of-way and probably file environmental impact statements, wasn't nearly as fast as they would have liked). Believe it or not, the commercial rail industry is doing pretty well. In fact, one of their biggest problems is scheduling -- they're scrambling to build out their facilities and obtain more rolling stock. Intermodal (hauling semi-trailers) traffic is a big part of it, and given the price of diesel now, it's just going to get bigger.

Two railroads completed the Transcontinental Railroad: The Union Pacific (East Coast to Utah) and the Central Pacific (West Coast to Utah).

The Central Pacific evolved/merged into the Southern Pacific. Interestingly as a side-note, one of the presidents of the SP was Leland Stanford, who founded a small school in California by the same name.

The SP had quite a few different divisions, including shipping, communications, et cetera.

Which finally brought us to the...

Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications

...one of the biggest three telcos in the entire world.


aka SPRINT.