Rail suffers a lot from inflexibility and the massive redundancy required to survive the occasional track maintenance. Trailer-on-railroad does not really impro

Rail suffers a lot from inflexibility and the massive redundancy required to survive the occasional track maintenance. Trailer-on-railroad does not really improve on that. A true logistics moonshot would have to go all the way to "roadgoing, powered railcars" that could platoon on that double-track and maybe opt into some form of power delivery (overhead line?) where available, switching on the fly between rubber/air and steel wheelsets as required. The beauty of this expensive approach is that it would not only obviate waiting for a train going in the right direction and the requirement for mode switching terminals (those are just the fair weather sailing benefits), but also eliminate the inherent fragility of highly interdependent railroad schedules. Where conventional rail quickly breaks down completely, road can gracefully degrade towards a massive traffic jam slowly grinding forward on some dirt road fallback route.