I know nothing about how these are built. But I would imagine big orders for marginal cars ( ones at their end of life point) would go up. Another industry around retrofitting should pop up for cars that are early in their life, and those sold —with a retrofit required for use.
There is no way the existing infrastructure could handle that.
But regulators rarely have had to “make” anything, so they would have no idea.
Just like the EPA mandating more cellulose ethanol be used than the industry was capable of producing. They fined them anyways.
As it happens, I do know something about how these tank cars are built.
So I know that there are ALREADY special steel walls on each car, in addition to the walls of the tanks themselves, to prevent puncture of those tanks by the couplings of other cars, if a derailment should occur.
Of course, modifying the design of tank cars by adding additional steel walls and barriers will not prevent “stupidity”, such as:
(1) parking a train, loaded with LOW VOLATILITY oil, on an incline above a town — thereby setting up a hours-long war between the air-brakes restraining the train and gravity.
(2) failing to repair a mis-firing diesel engine in a locomotive on that train, as a result of which hot oil was sprayed out of its exhaust into the environment.
(3) failing to have an engineer watch the mis-firing diesel engine, even though continuous operation of that engine was required to provide power to the compressor that was needed to provide the air-pressure that made the air- brakes work.
(4) failure to anticipate the small fire, which was started outside the locomotive by the oil spray from the defective diesel engine.
(5) failure of the fire department to notice that, when they put out the small fire, the apparently logical action of turning the diesel engine “off” meant that the air-brake system would soon lose its pressure and that, as a result, the air-brakes restraining the train would soon fail.
(6) failure to locate the engineer who had left the train for his scheduled “break” (who might have known all these important facts) and failure to return him to his “duty”.
(7) locating storage tanks for the HIGH VOLATILITY LPG that was used in the town on a curve in the tracks right in the middle of that town, so that any derailment of any railcars (even lumber-cars and boxcars) could puncture those tanks and create an explosion that would be hot enough to ignite buildings and ignite any low-volatility fuel oil spilled on the ground.
But, hey, let’s never let a “crisis” go to waste...