This Spigot/PaperMC plugin loads chunks for moving minecarts automatically, enabling efficient long-distance transport with no players and no manual chunk loaders required.

It works by dynamically loading a region of chunks around moving minecarts only. After the minecart stopped or was destroyed, you can optionally keep the last region loaded for a period of time (e.g. for automatic unloading or other redstone circuits at the destination).
If there are loaded regions when the server gets stopped, they will be seamlessly loaded again upon the next server start to ensure that the minecarts start moving again.

Designed with efficiency at its core, this plugin was developed with performance at the highest priority from the start.
For reasonable region sizes and number of minecarts, you shouldn't see any performance issues.
Tested with both Spigot and Paper.