by Kevin Burton
My dream vacation is to accompany my bride on a long, interrupted train ride along the Mississippi River.
The plan is to ride the City of New Orleans train on Amtrak – the one that Arlo Guthrie sang about – from Chicago to Memphis, get off and explore that town for maybe four days, then get back on and ride to New Orleans and explore that town for three or four days, then fly back to Kansas.
That’s a lot of train riding. By the 300th or 400th mile we may well be cursing Arlo Guthrie under our breath. But I love the idea anyway. It speaks of leisure and breathing easy.
As the Burtons turn those dreams into tentative plans, in the meantime, here are some facts about trains from the Interesting Facts website. Some of them will rattle your bones:
You Can thank trains for time zones.
Before 1833, local time was all over the place; communities set their own clocks to noon when the sun was highest in the sky, which led to at least 144 different local times in North America.
This wasn’t a huge deal when people were traveling slowly by foot and horseback, but with trains, people could suddenly travel across wider distances more quickly — and train operators needed consistent schedules to coordinate. Even small miscommunications about time could lead to missed connections and accidents.
Railroads established a four-time-zone system in 1833, and used it for decades before the U.S. government officially established time zones in 1918.
The fastest public train can travel 286 MPH
Japan’s bullet trains are. known for their lightning speed, but a handful of trains have eclipsed them — one of them being Shanghai’s maglev train, which uses magnetic levitation instead of wheels on conventional tracks. Its entire 19-mile run takes just seven and a half minutes, reaching top speeds of 286 miles per hour.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg for maglev trains. The fastest recorded train speed is nearly 375 miles per hour, clocked during a test run of a maglev train in Japan.
Railroads used to be powered by horses
The earliest railroad tracks were for horse-drawn trains, not locomotives. The tracks provided extra support and guidance, which meant that horses could carry greater loads. After the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened with a steam-powered locomotive in 1830, jokes and cartoons about unemployed horses abounded, although horses were still used for shunting — moving trains from one line to another. Horses continued to haul streetcars into the 20th century.
America’s first locomotive lost a race to a horse
When the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad — you might know it as the B&O Railroad — began operations in May 1830, it used only horse-drawn carriages. Steam locomotives were in use in Britain already, but because the planned system in America had steep hills and sharp curves, some engineers doubted that the machines could handle the route.
This concerned B&O directors, so they turned to an inventor named Peter Cooper to see if he could create an engine that was up to the task. He cobbled one together out of scraps, including an old brass engine, discarded wheels, and musket barrels. Later dubbed “Tom Thumb,” it performed beautifully along a 7-mile test run, then again on a 13-mile test, reaching a then-impressive 18 miles per hour.
According to an 1868 lecture at the Maryland Institute by B&O lawyer John H.B. Latrobe, who was present on the 13-mile test, Tom Thumb also took part in a bit of a race. The owners of a stagecoach company saw the engine running along the track and challenged Cooper to a race along double tracks. The engine got an early lead, but a part slipped off, causing it to come to a halt.
It was a quick fix, but by the time Cooper got going again, the horse was too far ahead. Losing the race didn’t have any effect on Tom Thumb’s future, though — he’d already impressed the B&O directors, who were determined to make the locomotive the way of the future.
Tomorrow: More train facts.
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