Very good point. Somehow I never thought of this as being and "electric train engine" but your right.
A lot of new technologies have been announced that seem like they could help out the train industry. Tesla was even working on a battery operated self driving long haul semi-truck. I wonder if something like that could be adapted to run on train tracks? I've heard that people are planning on ways to build charging technologies into roadways for electric vehicles so they would charge as they drove. I wonder if this could work better than the cables.
Room temperature superconductors could solve a lot of these issues with electrical technologies and could have us using floating low friction trains. It sounded like someone was close to figuring this out a while ago but I've heard nothing recently about it. (Maybe the funding was cut for more important things? LOL) It does seem possible that someday this might be developed. I've heard that our brains function as a type of superconductor but I'm not sure if that is correct or not.