I suppose you can come up with a solution to anything that doesn't have the railways involved. It's going to sound silly, but you could load grain into backpacks and carry them across the mountains with Sherpas. It's not a viable alternative. When it comes to the cost of trucking grain and all the implications for our roads and everything like that.... Farmers truck grain from their farms to the elevators, but when it comes to shipping grain over long distances from the elevator network to the port terminal facilities, railways are really the only viable solution economically.
On September 12th, 2017. See this statement in context.