I come from a railroad family four generations and went EE so I find things like transporting giant transformers by rail to be pretty interesting, since I was a

I come from a railroad family four generations and went EE so I find things like transporting giant transformers by rail to be pretty interesting, since I was a kid. I'm probably one of few people who as a kid had a model railroad HO scale schnabel car setup, pretty cool, I think my dad made it by hand as model railroaders sometimes do. We have about two dozen schnabel cars in the entire USA and they can only roll about 10 MPH. Luckily they only roll at 10 MPH or so, because RR personnel have to do crazy stuff to move oversize loads like remove and reinstall traffic lights and occasionally, level crossing "arms". Sometimes they have to cut down and replace telephone poles and crazy stuff like that. Logistics has friction and obviously if your entire national grid is down you can't haul using electric RR engines but USA is mostly diesel anyway. Another friction is you need 10 cars for a local event in Florida but they're all over the country and the bearings can't roll faster than 10 MPH and it takes a long time to cross the USA at 10 MPH as the pioneers learned. Another friction is they actually use those cars for stuff other than carrington event transformer replacements, so taking all those cars for replacements for a decade or so means no nuclear reactor transport no steel mill roller transport etc. Of course "in reality" it would be easier to massively decentralize large transformer production and ship the personnel and raw copper on 747s to the site rather than now where we centralize production and then ship out. Of course we have no experience doing that, but its more likely to succeed than trying to ship via rail. In practice I think the problem with replacing a large number of large transformers is we MIGHT be able to do it under ideal conditions including full electrical power and normal levels of law and order, which we will not have after a carrington event. But for a specific substantial claim, even if we could 3-d print or star trek replicator large transformers on demand, or even if we had secret government warehouses full of them in Nevada, it would take months to years to transport all of them to specific sites. SOME work like clearing rights-of-way to pass the equipment could be done ahead of time. We have SOME ability at heavy mfgr plants like our world leading mining equipment plants to build new schnabel cars with a lead time of maybe months each. But it would be rough. Anyway you wanted a specific substantiated claim so here it is, we can't logistically ship a large number of large transformers.