US Railroad regulation is a hairball of government rules, control and micro-management, which has been built layer-by-layer by progressives and Fed.gov bureaucrats for 140 years.
Due to this long and highly political history of railroads, this industry is regulated like NO OTHER industry in the USA.
As such, I posit that no one here can have a concept of what is “common sense” regulation, what is necessary and what is unnecessary to run a railroad in the 21st century - myself included.