@thendrix I can only assume it was due to thermal expansion of the rails that caused warping. That's very unsettling that it was blamed on Climate Change and not poor management. Bridges on our pothole riddled roads have gaps that were engineered with the expansion and contraction coefficients of the materials in use. Rail road tracks are standardized to the point where they are used to transmit signals reliably. The contraction and expansion of steel is widely known of and the warping from heat wasn't considered as large of a problem as the contraction breaks.

Here's the interesting part, the steel is already used for communication and this has been used in the past for detecting breaks in the tracks. If it is reliably used for communication, measurements of resistance are likely refreshed many times per second with the signal strength.
Temperature increases result in mapped increases in Resistance.
This would mean that continual measurements of resistance with many constants are being received many times a second. Just throw in known thermal expansion coefficients and one can see that claims that this couldn't have been easily prevented are dismissed. It is very likely that people knew the danger but it wasn't investigated or stopped.