It’s an engineering program masquerading as a math problem. Long enough racks can have misalignment without noticeable issues because each segment has some play.
No. It's the other way around. If someone did FEA on the track and showed you a stress map, it would be obvious how uninteresting framing it as an engineering problem is.
Yeah, that's human interest to get you interested in the problem and how it occurred to the author. Do you think the trolley problem is about trolley cars on rails with switches?
The most upvoted response was objectively wrong due to real world constraints.
The real world is irrelevant in the trolly problem or the 4 color theorem etc.
You may personally be interested in it as a purely mathematical problem, but he’s looking for a real world answer so poor abstractions are useless. On the other hand “I would first check for track flatness. When locked in with extra effort, the loop will warp a little, basically going into 3d instead of flat 2d.” is a useful shortcut.
Based on his history in StackExchange, it is unlikely Lezzup is looking for a real world answer. The top tags of his posts are: mathematics, sudoku, geometry, logical-deduction, sequence, and enigmatic-puzzle.
The top rated answer was math, but it ignored the possibility that a section of track would be under tension to avoid intersecting with itself. For a mathematical curve that’s no issue, but physical objects add additional constraints to the problem.