Now there’s a thing I likely would not have thought up,

Rubber-coated ballast demonstrates improved track resilience

https://www.railjournal.com/in_depth/rubber-coated-ballast-demonstrates-improved-track-resilience

Can coating ballast with repurposed tyres provide the added resilience required to alleviate track stresses and ballast displacement on heavy-haul lines? Shunturi Govender, civil engineer at Transnet Freight Rail, South Africa, investigates the potential of Comsa’s Neoballast solution, which has been developed under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research initiative.