What about beefing up the freight rail infrastructure to move more goods “intermodal”, making more trucking more intrastate and intra-regional and less very long haul.
I think that is not attractive to many industries, including retail, where “just in time” has been the goal for EVERYTHING. And, while freight trains can carry more goods in weight per mile, I imagine getting the trains loaded with the containers, the miles per hour that trains can travel (currently averaging only about 38 miles per hour), and the fewer end-to-end points trains travel (compared to the many routes of multiple trucks that replace a single train), shipping remains focused so much on using the trucking industry.
The problem with the rail industry is that over the last 35 years I have been a lumber broker the railroads have abandoned hundreds of sidings around North America.
For example, back in the 1970’s almost every larger lumber yard had a rail siding. Railcars shipped from the west coast or Canada back east or down south. The serving carrier would spot the flatbed or box car at the customers siding. Even if they only received one railcar per month or less.
Starting in the 1980s the railroads started abandoning lower volume sidings. Especially, after deregulation went into effect. So, a lot of the smaller volume yards had to start purchasing by truckload delivery. Reload facilities sprang up in most major cities. A reload unloads the railcar and then delivers to the customer by truckload.
Even several sawmills in more rural areas like North central Idaho no longer have rail service. I purchase from several sawmills whose rail service was abandoned in the last 25 years. They now have to truck their lumber to a place where it is loaded on rail car.
When you start adding all these extra origin reload and destination reload charges, in many cases it is cheaper to just truck directly to the customer.
The railroads really do not like making the milk run to fill up a train before it heads south or east.
They much prefer picking up 100 cars loaded with coal in WY and bring the entire train to the port of Tacoma. Same thing with tankers full of oil. The entire train goes from ND to the refinery without stopping. This is the type of business the BNSF, UP, CN, CPRS all love.