Trains are not actually easy to run with renewable energies. You need constant power over long distances to run trains effectively.

I would much rather have a coal or nuclear plants to run a fleet of trains rather then a bunch of batteries and some solar panels. Any volcano could disrupt not just air travel but also take down your land based transportation system.

But I agree insofar has having transportation being electric is a good thing. The same could be done for planes at some point. Elon Musk actually has a surprisingly good idea for an electric plane but he has no time to do it.

Even if you're running your trains off coal, you still win. Large scale power production is inherently more efficient. And we can do a lot better than coal of course, natural gas is much better for air quality. Current nuclear is miles better in terms of pollution and speculative near-future fission (LFTR,etc) could be damn near "renewable" in terms not having to worry about running out of the stuff. You've also got hydro, wind, solar, etc. In practice those later three aren't nearly as unreliable as you make them out to be.

Anyway, the point is that grid power is excellent no matter were you get it from, and because you can run them off the grid trains are exceptional.

Basically agree.

Only one point, nuclear is already pretty much unlimited. We don't need LFTR for that. Uranium is easily plentiful enough and newer designs that are much closer then a full LFTR can use it much more efficiently as well.

Thorium would be nice because its already a waste product of current mining, however Thorium is really only worth it if you are doing a LFTR, with most other designs Uranium is preferable.