It's called "dispersed redundancy", and we depend on it in the electric transmission sectors. Of course, we're closer to our consumers than railroads are to theirs - if a transmission line goes down and we can't immediately reroute, we hear about it right away from angry households. But since railroads are still comparatively removed from the public eye, you can have severe disruptions in rail service and the Average Joe never knows until he reads about it in the paper or on the evening news.

It's somewhat lucky this particular rail service disruption happened where it did since UP had a nearby alternative in BNSF's Dechutes route and can also access the Siskiyou route for limited diversions if need be.

Can you imagine the economic impact if a severe disruption of similar magnitude occured to the UP in the Blue Mountains, or to BNSF somewhere in "The Funnel" e.g. rail bottlenecks for which there are no nearby alternative routings? Frankly, it's only a matter of time until US rail policy that allowed for massive retrenchment and abandonments comes back to haunt us to an extent of inducing an ecomomic recession.