More Extensive Use of Trains for Transporting Petroleum?

If you look on the scale of that graph, the amount moved by railroads and trucks is much smaller than moved by pipelines and ships/boats. Railroads and trucks combined are still less than barges.

Canada actually moves an even higher percentage of petroleum by pipeline than the United States (97%). Some of that might be due to Canada's pipeline infrastructure running mostly North to South in order to deliver crude petroleum to refineries in the United States (Canada has a shortage of refinery capacity and is a net importer of refined petroleum).

Looks like the US would need five times as many oil trains to increase the flow by 10% with trains alone.
 
I did a bit of reading and found that its the spread of oil prices between North Dakota and Mexico (for example) that gives train employment transporting oil. This year the spread has narrowed so the Gulf Coast refineries are getting their oil from Mexico rather than North Dakota. However the genie is out of the bottle after the surge in 2013, new and better oil railcars have been built which alter the economic of rail transport so it will remain a regular fixture and when the next good price spread comes rail will again make big strides.
 
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