You are probably right but there are some things to consider here.
1) Transporting nuclear waste by rail is not exactly blue sky research. I don't think anyone seriously doubts we can find a way to get that done. Which is not say it will not take a great deal of thinking, research, testing, around the safety engineering of it or that it would be expensive to do.
2) It may prove politically impossible to ever transport these materials on a large scale. After the recent accidents with oil on rail, have the public pretty squeamish, about hazardous materials moving thru their back yards. Decades of propaganda have lots of people afraid and opposed to atomic* or nuclear* in general. In the wake of Fukushima we have already seen major western nations shutter their nuclear generating. If these trains were ready to roll today and there was a disposal site, politics would never let it happen. So there may be no need to undertake 1.
3) For practical reasons there may never be any disposal site. First for technical reasons breaders probably still make more sense, and solve the spent fuel problem. If we move in that direction most of the spent fuel isn't spent at all and it may be better to keep where it is now so its accessible. Reduces the need for 1, although only partially we still might need to move the stuff between sites.
4) Politically there may never be a disposal site. Reid has basically killed Yucca. If we can't muster the political will to put a storage facility in sparsely populated low economic value desert I don't know how we'd ever get it done anywhere else.
5) Environmentally it has been determined that even Yucca, most promising spot identified today is really not as ideal as we once thought. There may not be anyplace that is really 'good' to use as a radio active waste dump. Again killing the need for 1.
So in light of the fact that 1 is a known obstacle which we are confident is solvable, while the fundamental issues are more open questions it probably does make more sense to try and resolve the other issues first.