In addition to more oil being spilled, rail lines transit through populated places while pipelines are routed away from them.
There's a rail line running right through the central business district of my town, and it's the primary route between Alberta and the Pacific ocean. I sure wish all that oil was travelling through a pipeline instead of my town.
because rail is used for things other than oil (the whole reason people in this thread say transporting oil by rail is better), and those things require it to be near populated places.
if you build a dedicated oil railway that doesn't go anywhere populated and just goes from the oilfield to the refinery, then you've reinvented a pipeline, but worse.
There's a rail line running right through the central business district of my town, and it's the primary route between Alberta and the Pacific ocean. I sure wish all that oil was travelling through a pipeline instead of my town.