Rail wear obscured the larger railgun power problem

Why were railguns returned to research, and did rail erosion make them impractical compared with other electromagnetic guns?

Rail wear was real but overstated by old test materials; inadequate shipboard power generation and energy storage were the deeper obstacles.

An earlier answer says railguns would likely return to DARPA because their power-generation requirements were not ready for service. The later discussion adds that widely cited rail-life tests used metallurgy already about fifteen years old and experimental rails rather than the intended final components. Rail erosion was real, but those tests did not prove that better production rails would fail at the same rate. The harder program problem was power generation and storage, because the weapon demanded substantially more electrical capacity than planners had allocated. Blaming a visible wearing component offered an easier explanation than admitting that the ship-level energy budget had been underestimated.