Not true. You can pump water to an existing hydroelectric dam, but you can also just pump it to a pond on a hilltop. No environmental disruption. There are lots of hills.

The rail system needs maintained rolling stock and maintained rails. The mineshaft method is overwhelmingly cheaper and more reliable, because all that must be kept working is an electric winch. There are lots and lots of disused mineshafts.

Sorry, you can't make hydropower without constructing a dam, turbines, and completely disrupting the stream. This is environmentally destructive, and due to the scale needed, there are few suitable sites.

There are indeed many unused mineshafts, but a shaft would be only suitable for a small weight, maybe enough for a single house. This does not scale.

Pumped hydro doesn't require a stream, since it isn't harvesting energy from a preexisting flow of water.

How are you going to create a large enough pond?

This involves moving earth in places with suitable topography. The economics depends on both the vertical offset between the two reservoirs, and how much earth has to be moved per unit of reservoir volume.

Algorithms have been created to use GIS data to automatically find potential PHES sites. There are lots of candidates. Australia, for example, has 300x more potential that it would need for a 100% renewable grid.

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

Often there is already a depression you can use as is. Or deepen, and use the excavation for a dike.

If not, maybe there is a box canyon you can close the end of with a dam.

In places, they have flattened a convex hilltop and used the material to make a dike.

Usually you don't need anywhere near as much storage volume as a typical hydroelectric dam reservoir holds.

Maybe read up? When you just make shit up as you go along, you say dumb things.

Asking a question is not making things up.