Pipe dreams are where feasible ideas start. No matter where you burn it, this country or another, there is still a big environmental problem with burning coal in a traditional fashion without modification. "Clean coal" is an oxymoron even with scrubbers. This is just my personal opinion, but there might be a much friendlier market for coal by reducing it to methane (natural gas) and coke, which still has a market for steel producers and burns much cleaner than raw coal. By combining an ecologically well designed coal processing plant with coastal (Coos Bay?)transport and loading, it seems potentially feasible, off the top of one's head for domestic or export markets. It seems that a variant of this solution might also be a feasible retrofit for the Davenport cement plant on the Santa Cruz branch. It once ran on methane, but it got tooo expensive, and was converted to coal. If such a coal-processing component were added, it could be returned to much cleaner methane power and provide three outbound products, coke, soda ash and cement. Sewage and agricultural biomass waste mixed together to produce methane is an under-researched potential energy source that could be well-served by a rail connection, but that probably deserves its own thread. Biomass that is usually burned atmospherically could be turned into a rail commodity of value if transported to suitable facilities and converted to methane and subsequently electricity.