"We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open"

[ProfessorGAC]

30. I'm Highly Suspicious Of That Report

I have seen a LOT of railcars transporting hazardous materials. I have never seen a refrigerated tank car. Not once.
Where would the power to run refrigeration come from?
Volatles like VC are shipped under pressure. For VC, the pressure needed to liquefy is only around 45psig. Tank cars designed for pressure service easily handle that.
It's a liquid in the car, with no cooling needed. Even ammonia isn't shipped refrigerated & it has a MUCH higher vapor pressure. (About 120psig at room temperature. )
So, I am dubious that the reports of refrigeration are accurate.
As to why it's not used in situ: it's not really practical from a financial standpoint. The monomer process is capital intensive, so to make it viable, the manufacturing sites have to be huge. If every PVC maker had their own monster plant, the scale-down cost would be immense.
Then, making all the polymer in one place would make for massive facilities with massive multimodal transportation hubs taking up huge amounts of real estate.
That's true of ALL hazardous substances. If everything were consolidated like that, who would want to live there?
You would like a solution to avoid things like this? So would I.
I think the solution is tighter regulation of the carriers so they can't simply ignore needed upgrades & repairs because they're inconvenient. Millions of tons of hazardous goods are moved and safely. The cause here seems more slovenly maintenance & disregard for safety than any inherently uncontrollable risk.
BTW: there are goods even more hazardous than VC and we've heard little about incidents like this one.
Make disregard for safe handling & care a crime, then prosecute violators. That will greatly reduce the risk of recurrence. Jail time & a ruined life would go a long way to dissuade people from only thinking about the next quarter's earnings report.