This Seems To Be,

an idea that could have caught on,

 the truck-train, the idea was first illustrated in the pamphlet Transportation of Tomorrow and its Relation to Society and Economics from 1935 (with drawings by J.F. Hickman),

basically have the containers with their own wheel that will fit both rail and road, at the rail terminal the container is then picked up by a normal road tractor unit, but I guess it was not such a great idea as it never caught on, having said that I then found this entry in Wikipedia, the idea is still not popular, but I thought it looked neat.