As unlikely as it may seem now, I can imagine a day when we regret removing so much of our urban freight network. Railroad managers may want little to do with spotting centerbeams at lumber yards now, but given traffic congestion and the trend to find alternatives to highways, who is to say that we won't someday want to return to using rail for distributing higher-value products such as merchandise and produce in our cities? Some places still even have these factory things in the form of light-industrial...

We may come to look back upon this era's removal of this infrastructure the same way most of us look at the removal of first generation of electrified rail transit systems.