The issue is you need to grind the tracks multiple times a year on busy routes, along with ballast tamping or replacement. That's set by total gross tonnage not by a set time span, and these maintenance items are not optional. Tamping prevents pumping and rail fatigue which can be catastrophic if you allow it to degrade and suddenly fail. Rail grinding removes microcracks created by fatigue due to every wheel passing over it. Grinding deletes the cracks, but if you leave it for too long the cracks grow and can total the rail. 10 minutes per panel is a long time when you need to maintain tens of thousands of kms of track.

Even a short distance between two towns is a maintenance headache. It could take weeks to remove the panels entirely and that's before you get started doing maintenance at all... All you've accomplished is removing a maintenance obstacle you put there in the first place. Then you have to put it all back when you're done...

A railroad typically spends 1-3% of the entire cost to build a km of track just to maintain it every year. That's a big operating cost that eats into rail budgets already (part of why I believe they should all be nationalized to better align public incentives with a natural monopoly but that's beyond this conversation.)

For reference, most rail costs around $1-3 million per km to build, $5-10 million or more within urban areas due to land acquisition. Typical railroad maintenance is somewhere around $10 000-$30 000 per km per year with unrestricted access. 20 mins round trip per panel (probably half an hour with deadtime between panels moving tools and gear) that's a massive amount of increased costs and more importantly service interruption. You can't pass revenue traffic when they're doing this.

I'm guessing that the picture in the OOP article is standard gauge at 1435mm, so I figure each panel is roughly 2m long? 500 panels per km roughly? 5000 minutes to remove, let's say 15 min to be more realistic on pace, so 7500 minutes. That's 125 person-hours per km to remove panels. Maybe a team of 2-6 and a backhoe on track wheels? At an average wage of $60/hr for a team of 2 people that should cost $7500 just to remove panels from 1km of track and it would take 5.2 days of labour, at 8 hour shifts that's 15.625 days of labour, let's say 16 days. 2 weeks and 2 days at $7500 and you have to do it all over again to put them back in place. You would need to do that at least once a year, probably multiple times though.

I'm also accounting for the cost of machinery in the wage number. Maybe it would be closer to $40-50? But I've also always heard to take the wage paid to a worker and triple it for the true total cost once everything is considered (unemployment, health and safety, tickets .etc) so the total bill for round tripping panels off and on could cost almost as much as normal maintenance on the permanent way?

You seem in good spirits, so not assuming you are a troll, but you realize that the 10 minute estimate instantly doubles because that's both on and off for each panel. And the people who estimate work at scale never actually do the work, so add at least 5 mins per panel and multiple that by thousands per stretch of track to be regularly maintained.

And all of this ignoring that you now have an order of magnitude more potential failure points for both the panels, the tracks and the trains riding them. All as you assume that every single bolt, bracket and gasket will be properly reinstalled while workers do this mind numbing, repetitive task for days and weeks on end.

As a fun side benefit, the trains of course cannot run during this constant maintenance period.