by Kevin Burton
“There’s something magical about train travel for just about everybody,” writes the Interesting Facts website, “whether you’re an engineering nerd, a hopeless romantic, a world traveler, or an easily excitable 8-year-old.”
The longest train ride I have taken so far was (round-trip) from Wasilla, Alaska up to Denali National Park. My mother came up for a visit while I was working for The Frontiersman newspaper there.
That was a fun trip, made better by the train ride and the fact that neither of us was responsible for driving.
In hope to do more train riding in years to come. For now, here are some more facts about trains from Interesting Facts:
In Victorian times, trains were considered hazardous to your health
As train travel was starting to get popular in the mid-19th century, rumors spread — among doctors and nondoctors alike — that trains were dangerous, and not because of crash risks.
All sorts of woes were attributed to the speed and roughness of locomotive travel. Some believed it could trigger insanity and create “railway madmen.” Others claimed it could cause miscarriages or upset women’s delicate constitutions.
One doctor said that a train trip made a patient’s “brain congestion” worse, even though he’d been feeling better after treatment with leeches.
New York’s MTA turned decommissioned trains into artificial reefs
When trains in New York City’s subway system get decommissioned, they can be sold, scrapped, or repurposed. Many of them can then be found on the ocean floor, providing homes for marine life as artificial reefs.
Some car models work better than others; the Redbird cars, made of carbon steel, worked so well that states started competing for them. Redbird Reef in Delaware is home to around 700 such decommissioned cars, and they created a thriving ecosystem in an area that used to be barren.
The stainless steel Brightliner cars, on the other hand, disintegrated almost immediately underwater — the material was vulnerable to corrosion, and their corrugated texture made it easy for currents to rip them apart.
The longest freight train was 4.57 miles long
It’s no fun getting caught at a railroad crossing and waiting for a long freight train to pass. But next time it happens, you can thank your lucky stars it’s not 4.57 miles long like one train that ran in Western Australia in 2001. It was both the longest and heaviest train recorded.
Pulled by eight locomotives, the 682 ore cars made a 171-mile journey transporting iron ore from a couple of mines run by mining company BHP to Port Hedlund.
Americans used to love crashing trains on purpose
Before there was demolition derby, there were staged, head-on train collisions. From the 1890s through the 1930s, train crashes were a popular attraction at fairs and festivals, drawing tens of thousands of spectators.
One of the biggest wrecks was an 1896 publicity stunt in Waco, Texas, for a struggling railroad line known as the Katy Railroad. The company offered rides to the crash site for $2 from anywhere in Texas, and built a temporary town around the viewing area, complete with a restaurant and jail. The crash itself created a massive explosion, which sadly killed two people in the crowd.
This is just one of the most famous out of hundreds of on-purpose train collisions. The most prolific train-wrecker was Joe Connolly, otherwise known as “head-on Joe.” Between 1896 and 1932, Connolly staged 70 wrecks and destroyed 146 locomotives — at least. He became an engineer of chaos, coming up with extra stunts such as strapping dynamite to the trains. The practice, which came to be viewed as wasteful, fell out of favor during the Great Depression.
It takes almost a week to ride the full Trans-Siberian railroad
The longest single-train ride in the world is the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The main track starts in Moscow and travels 5,772 miles through diverse Russian landscapes before arriving in Vladivostok, a large port city on the sea of Japan. The full journey takes more than six days.
Other routes on the network are the Trans-Mongolian Railroad, which heads through Mongolia to Beijing, China, and the Trans-Manchurian Railroad, which dips down into northeastern China before meeting the main line back in Vladivostok.
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