The thing is that you’ll never get trucks off the road unless you find a means of transporting goods to each individual retailer from the freight hubs. As it is now I think the average radius each freight rail hub covers is around 500 miles by truck.
It isn’t necessary to get all trucks off the road — it’s a matter of taking off as many as makes economic sense to do so.
That’s why I added the bit about switching modes. New hubs can be added, the distance between them doesn’t need to remain at 500 miles. That likely reflects the economics of older intermodal technologies — the point where it becomes economic to go multi-modal. If containers can be switched rapidly and cheaply (which new technologies do allow), then the break-even distance between trucking only, and multi-modal drops.
Even if it was only adopted by UPS, FedEx and USPS in Texas, it would get a third of the trucks currently on I-35 off the road and they could have their containers dropped off at their facilities right away rather than having to wait for a train to arrive, unload, go to the next station, unload, etc., etc. - and unlike the train, it scales up and down plus isn’t held to a fixed schedule.
FYI, it’s a bunch of ex-Lockheed engineers behind this.