at large distances from the centre of the world, when a detector rail is has a minecart placed on it, and is moved by a piston in unison with the minecart, the detector rail appears to lose track of the minecart and becomes unpowered despite having a minecart on it. Providing a block update does not fix the issue.
While I don't know the lower bound on how close to the world centre this can occur, I know that it happens anywhere beyond 15 million blocks away
Edit: with some testing, I've found that this only occurs at distances greater than or equal to 16777216 blocks from 0 0 0 on either the X or Z axis. As long as the position is less than that on both axis, there is no issue. This also happens to be exactly equal to 2^8. This (at least to me) suggests this is a data type limitation, meaning that the position is being handled with the byte data type in java, which consists of 8 bits and can store any value equivalent to 0–>16777215 in base 10. this could be resolved by using the short data type, as it is 16 bit and can thus handle any co-ordinate values within the minecraft world.
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Duplicate of MC-183174
When we fiddled with "the (journey in a minecart to the) end of the world" back in 2014, we also noticed that Redstone (and more) behaves "weirdly"/differently so far away from Origin.
Personally, I wouldn't like to see this being fixed. There doesn't seem to be a reason for it being fixed at this point in time, as both in Survival as well as in Creative, e.g. for mapmakers, that many blocks in all 4 directions should more than suffice, even if you set up very large, separate areas with different content.
While one could argue that anything should behave the same anywhere in Minecraft, if seen from a real life scientifical view, it seems rather more realistic if "the Laws of Physics" of a Universe/Realm does not apply to everything the same, everywhere, in all areas.
This kind of uncertainty can be used to create some oddities in Vanilla, see also MC-186362, although "oddities" are of course not limited to those visuals.
Anything that can enrichen a player experience - e.g. also seen from a mapmaker's view - is for me, personally, an argument that should be considered.