Just to balance out the discussion:
“Increasing volumes of crude oil transported by rail raise questions of safety,” the IEA said in its medium-term oil market report. “Our analysis reveals that compared to pipelines, rail incident rates are higher while the opposite holds for spill rates.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-14/pipelines-spill-three-times-as-much-oil-as-trains-iea-says.html
And a different report:
Over the past decade, total railroad crude oil spills equal less than one percent of the total pipelines spills. (2002-2012, railroads spilled 2,268 barrels total vs. pipelines’ 474,441 barrels total).
Last year, the pipeline crude oil spill percentage was 10 times that of the railroads (Rail = 0.00006% vs. pipelines = 0.0005% in 2012).
Over the past decade (2002-2012), the estimated spill rate for crude oil moving by rail was 0.38 compared with the estimated pipeline spill rate of 0.88 (measured as gallons spilled per million barrel miles moved).
https://www.aar.org/safety/Documents/Freight%20Railroads%20Safely%20Moving%20Crude%20Oil.pdf
Agree with finetrader about imagining a world without pipelines. Impractical to move large volumes without dedicated pipe. That and the optics of pipeline spills are always bad due to the large volumes involved.