[Unseelie]

Well, Rail is efficient in that it ships huge quantities...fifty, or a hundred standardized containers. Trucks do a bit less than one of those, and so are -amazing- if you only have to ship that much between points C and W (point A being a manufacturer in Asia, b being a port, and C being a major freight station)

Rail is a great solution for a specific portion of that network, but it becomes very, very inefficient if you're only moving one box of goods to a town, and in a nation this size, with as dispersed a population as ours, you simply cannot manage the outlay of hundreds of thousands of railway spikes...and taken to the smaller position, you'd still need trucks unless the railways went to each and every department store.