[Legbreaker]

Troops come into play because of conscription. Also, you're going to see the military buying up all sorts of equipment all of which will need raw materials such as steel to make. With military age men and women being drafted there's also corresponding pressure on the factories, etc for manpower.

Yes, of course the military would be using rail when and were possible, just as they've done almost since the first railway track was laid. This again will likely have an impact on other areas with rolling stock tied up for shifting tanks, etc rather than raw materials and finished goods.

If the war was expected to drag on then yes, investment would have been made in transport infrastructure, but we already know that the first six months or so NATO was on the advance with the Pact barely able to slow them down until the China issue was effectively resolved by use of nukes. Until that stage the railways had obviously been up to the task required of them as the books state the units held back in the US were there because of a lack of available shipping, not rolling stock.

With June 1997 comes the destruction of the "last major naval fleet-in-being". At this point you can be damn sure all available steel would be redirected to the shipyards, as would a great deal of manpower. It's very unlikely any shipping would have been completed though before November stopped everything.

I don't know what the state of the US rail system was, I'm not there and never have been, but it's fairly common knowledge it wasn't in good condition. I also don't know when IRL upgrade works commenced, nor how far along they were by 1996/97. There are plenty of people on here better placed than me to comment on that. However, the points I've made above about pressures on manpower and resources apply equally to all nations around the world, although the Soviets may have been in a slightly better position as they'd been at war a bit longer and their economy was already on a war footing.