I think if you try to place rail (or anything) while zoomed in on the map, it places them as ghosts instead of trying to build them. You could also make some blueprints for long sections of rails with signals, or for intersections. Blueprints always place as ghosts, so those could help you too ...

Is it possible to toggle the rail planner? Holding shift down results in a lot of hand pain (not to mention being unable to rotate the ghost rails clockwise, though maybe that's a my-keybinds-thing), so placing long rails is difficult to do.

This appears to be resolved in 0.17.4!

Attached save game crashes on load with the following callstack and error:

21.132 Info Scenario.cpp:147: Map version 0.17.2-4
Factorio crashed. Generating symbolized stacktrace, please wait ...
c:\cygwin64\tmp\factorio-build-5th2rl\libraries\stackwalker\stackwalker.cpp (924): StackWalker ...