Are there any practical uses for rails in a survival world?

I use rails when I have a large city that I need to get around quickly. Usually I'll set up a simple rail hub in a location of a city, and have a track go off to the important places like a storage building.

 

Well, rails are great for getting around underground while barely being detected, if you're clever about it.

 

I use it to transport mobs from time to time. Usually, I find rails and minecarts to be the best way to transport villagers. Maybe using them to get through the nether and The End realm are what make them useful.

 

I guess if you have several main areas around the place. That way you can travel quicker. But not a huge deal.

 

Yeah, I build rails between the mines and my home. It was pretty convenient and fast.

 

If you ever need to transport things from one place to another very quickly, rails are actually very helpful. Also, if you put your base on top of a mountain, it's way easier to get to the top if you set down a rail and cart system to keep you moving. This way, you don't have to build pointless stairs to the ground which honestly takes up a bar of food if you're high enough.

 

I haven't used rails myself, but I can see a use for them. A lot of people mine differently, and when you make a tunnel, it's easy for you to transport materials up and down your shaft in case you need to. I would consider them an additional portable inventory.

 

I use them in my mine to travel around faster and also to get to my XP farm that is quite far away.
They're useful if you need to travel long distances fast.

 

Rail has got many practical uses for survival and believe me, it is currently used for this purpose vastly all over the globe.

Rail is used to transport large amount of materials such as coal, petrol, diesel, keresone which are bet essential for survival.

Rail contributes its services for people who can't afford an air ticket and thus help greatly in survival.

 

I don't really ever find myself making rails because as you said, they are pretty resource intensive especially when you don't have an iron farm set up. When I do use rails, I get all of them from abandoned mineshafts because they are a lot of them in a small area. I usually use them to make complex storage systems because I don't know what else to with them.

 

A kind of fast travel would be their best use.

 

The only thing I have used rails for is to have a quicker mode of transportation to my mining site. I typically do not like to live where I mine just because of mobs and accidentally ruining my builds. So, having a rail system has become particularly useful to me in that aspect. Considering the amount of iron it takes to make each rail, I agree with your point of them not having a real "use" because they are not actually needed for anything.

 

I think that in 99% of all survival worlds in vanilla Minecraft rails have next to no use. You have to get to a point in your life where your base is so large that it takes an extremely long amount of time to travel around and in that situation rails would help. As for most bases the resources required to build a rail system is not worth it but possibly it could in the long run.

 

Yes! On one of my worlds I had a rail road track going around the entire world.

 

Honestly, yes, they do. The rails can be used more of a bus-like transportation method between two points which you visit occasionally. Also, if you're play multiplayer survival. You can use it as a way to get to your friends' houses from a main hub so easily.