Note: this is not a great idea; trains release less than a third as much co2 as a truck and electrifying cross country rail would be very expensive. You need extremely high voltage for long distance transmission, which is incompatible with pantographs (the metal things that power trains/buses from overhead).
You'd essentially need to build dedicated HVDC lines alongside all trunk routes, with regular substations (which are immensely expensive for HVDC) to inject power into the lines. Cross country HVDC would be really great for the grid, but it would be better to build a dedicated solution and forget about the trains. For context, the transmission losses for electricity cause ~2x more CO2 than all trains.
There are just better things to spend money on. Even if we put cold war levels on investment into reducing CO2 theres still better things to do, like dealing with landfill emissions, land use, rehabilitating environments etc.
> Not sure about those "carbon removal" techs. A lot of the CO2 tends to go in the atmosphere.
One way of looking at it: exhaust gases are 29% CO2 (from oxygen being burnt). Air is .4% CO2. Removing CO2 from air is, bare minimum, 75x more complex than preventing it.
> You can't fight unemployment and inequality and try to reduce emissions. I can see ideology being a big problem when dealing with climate change.
IMO that is a profoundly unhelpful way of looking at it. The money spent on the Iraq war would be enough to buy enough batteries to store ALL US ELECTRICITY for full two days. People didn't think twice about sprinting into war. Renewable energy is a largely trivial cost. People need to be convinced to throw scraps at it before we scare them with real changes.