“This is the best they’ve been doing in half a century,” says rail consultant Carl Martland, a retired MIT lecturer. “It’s hard to imagine a scenario where there is not growth. People are going to continue to eat, heat our homes, buy cars. If everything else is outsourced, that means all the products are going to be coming into the United States at a port in containers. How are they going to get where they’re going? They’re going to Chicago, Memphis, everyplace else by rail.”