Recipes and items are needed for the game to load (at least last time i tried it about 3 months ago).
I originaly tried this about a year ago when they reworked how rails are built but for some reason it didn't work then. I tried it a month ago and it worked so I released version 1.9.3. This release also removed limit to chest size. There is still problem if placed ghost chest is larger than steel chest stack size since bots can't grab enough chests at once.