alt Hacker NewsA railroad has to track a lot of data; what's in each car (declared by customer), what train it's attached to, where is it on maintenance schedules; similar for the rail and signal infrastructure, etc; in today's modern environment, they need multiple datacenters for high availability.
Something something route planning to reduce the number of coupling changes, etc, etc.
Edit: also, a lot of long distance fiber runs on railroad right of way, so datacenters at rail yards may be well placed for connectivity.
A railroad is the infrastructure for transporting commodities. In the modern digital economy, datacenters along with the whole internet infrastructure are the modern railroads, which need protection and deregulation for the sakes of safety, national security, economy etc etc. Maybe this argument works better if the others don't?