If you haven’t seen It the largest steam train in the world was restored by union pacific, #4014 big boy. It’s basically two heavy freight locos welded together into one machine over a hundred feet long. Lots of great videos of it online including a great video where it helps out a stalled mainline freight train running actual customer UP freight.





When you do the math on how much it costs both a private citizen along with the public to enable cars as transportation it’s mind boggling.
The province I live in makes around $90-100B / year in tax revenue, and spends around $4.5-5.5B / year on roads and road maintenance.
There’s also the hidden cost of road work caused by utilities being replaced, struck, or newly installed. We pay thx bill for that through our telecom, power, sewer .etc
Insurance, gas, car payments…
If a road is built to last 10 years then technically on average you’re replacing ⅒ of your roads every year. Utilities are the same and trenching/patching is horrible for roads necessitating rework on them earlier than the life expectancy. A fiber line might have a 40 year life span, but installing it turned a 20 year road into a 10 year replacement.