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Not a dumb question at all. It should console you that the shape of the rail was not worked out for some time after railroads were invented, and all sorts of different shapes were considered and tried, some very unsuccessfully. <br /> <br />The T-shaped rail works brilliantly in almost all respects, which is why it has persisted for about 150 years. One of the most important reasons it works, cited above, is that economically uses steel for the performance it provides. Rail is extremely expensive: mile after mile, it really adds up. In the 19th century when railroads were built, rail was the single largest cost, and railroads that built during periods of high iron and steel prices often went bankrupt. So engineers have worked very hard for over a hundred years designing sections that are as stingy of steel as possible. Some of the sections they've designed haven't turned out so well: the NYC used a section in the 1960s that got a very bad reputation because it turned out prone to breakage. <br /> <br />Rail is made of very high-quality steel, which is expensive. More importantly, the manufacturing techniques needed to achieve predictable performance in the field are extraordinarily difficult. A broken rail can easily cause a $2 million derailment, and a steel-maker who starts producing a rail with a proclivity toward breakage will be bankrupt in short order. Very few steel manufacturers have the technical skills or the money to be in the rail business.
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