Re warehouses and local permitting, could TOFC be the regulatory hack, at least for goods which don't care about temperature, etc.? Short-line railroads already make a decent amount of money storing unused railcars (e.g. if you drive around northern New England/upstate NY/PA, you'll find plenty of strings of empty tankers that previously cashed in on the Bakken shale boom but are now in storage on the tracks of shortlines that got sold off by Conrail/NS/CSX). STB regulatory pre-emption is well established and stationary TOFC is far less questionable than other cases where SurfBoard pre-emption of local zoning has been found.
Is there enough space for that? Warehouses are big, and I don't know how much you could stack things. It might make sense for some kinds of overflow, but there are 10bn sq ft of warehouse space in the US, so I'd be surprised if unused rail equipment had a material impact overall.
Re warehouses and local permitting, could TOFC be the regulatory hack, at least for goods which don't care about temperature, etc.? Short-line railroads already make a decent amount of money storing unused railcars (e.g. if you drive around northern New England/upstate NY/PA, you'll find plenty of strings of empty tankers that previously cashed in on the Bakken shale boom but are now in storage on the tracks of shortlines that got sold off by Conrail/NS/CSX). STB regulatory pre-emption is well established and stationary TOFC is far less questionable than other cases where SurfBoard pre-emption of local zoning has been found.
Is there enough space for that? Warehouses are big, and I don't know how much you could stack things. It might make sense for some kinds of overflow, but there are 10bn sq ft of warehouse space in the US, so I'd be surprised if unused rail equipment had a material impact overall.
I am reminded of Vaihinger's "as-if fictions".
Not familiar—worth reading?
Nope I haven't read him. I'm just aware of the concept (and I think it is a good one, especially in a post-Sapiens world).