As I think about the need to come up with other plans for US transportation infrastructure to get us away from cars, I immediately think of pushing better rail infrastructure. With that in mind, what would be the complexities with getting the automotive industry to begin retooling their production lines and retraining their workers to produce train engines/train cars/etc? It seems like the skill set to construct a large metal box with many living-room-like accoutrement internally would be similar between automobile manufacturing and rail-car manufacturing. Additionally, in order to provide a large-scale rail infrastructure the US would require a simple MASSIVE number of engines and rail-cars in the next decade.

I’m sure there are difficult things with this idea, but it makes sense, conceptually, at least, to me.