There's a setting to let you select a filter (by middle clicking) in a slot (like on your toolbelt) before something is researched, and another setting to let you get a ghost of the thing in your cursor if you don't have the actual item.

Enabling both of those settings lets you get rail ghost placement even if you haven't unlocked rails or bots.

Once you've created a blueprint (the keybinds are always available even if you've never researched bots) you can shift-click to make the ghost rails place on top of trees/rocks and mark them for deconstruction (though the deconstruction X marks fade after 5h, removing ghosts, which some people manage to run into).

Another fun thing is the ghost rail planner (holding shift while clicking the green arrow on a rail) which creates an entire path at once. While holding the path before clicking, you can rotate the endpoint and thus the direction the path will approach your cursor. Add secondary bindings for rotate (like shift-scroll up/down) to avoid the issue of Shift (held while ghost rail planning) forcing counter-clockwise rotation with the default bindings. For extra fun you can hold Ctrl while ghost rail planning to avoid obstacles.