The Sands folks have been heavily using Canadian railway and US rail companies...to move it around. For most of 2014, I made a fair amount of growth/profit from my investments in Canadian railways. In the last four weeks? I’ve lost most of my profits...less usage and traffic coming from the oil being moved that way.
Coal companies should be able to soak up any excess rail line capacity created by a drop in shale oil production, at least in the western United States.
Shipping oil by railcar is probably the last resort for bulk transport. Shipping by pipeline is the least expensive followed by supertanker. You can not load a super tanker in Vancouver or ship one through the Panama canal.
Think of how expensive to unload a train of 100+ tanker cars at the refinery. Each one has to hooked up unloaded. The spot for the cars on the rail siding probably only hold 20 cars at a time, if that. Logistically it is a lot easier for the refinery to offload a boatload than it is a trainload one car at a time. This costs money too.