This reasoning cannot lead to a practical policy directive. Volcanoes often lay dormant for thousands of years and their eruptions can deny huge amounts of land

This reasoning cannot lead to a practical policy directive. Volcanoes often lay dormant for thousands of years and their eruptions can deny huge amounts of land, which is not a reasonable tradeoff compared to "just rebuilding the railroad every 5000 years", since its service life is probably shorter than that anyway.