Train Facts

  • Monorails are single-beam tracks raised over city streets.
  • The first monorail was built in Wuppertal in Germany as long ago as 1901 and monorails have been seen as trains of the future ever since.
  • Monorails of the future may be air-cushion trains or maglevs, as at Birmingham airport.
  • A maglev is proposed in Japan to take passengers the 515 km from Tokyo to Osaka in under 60 minutes. Germany is planning a system called Transrapid.
  • Maglev trains are suspended by powerful magnets above a guide track. It is thought Maglevs of the future may exceed 800 km/h!
  • PRT or Personalized Rapid Transport is a system of small vehicles that run on elevated tracks at high speed and are operated electrically.
  • 300 km/h plus High Speed Train (HST) systems such as the French TGV are being built in many countries. A line from Moscow to St Petersburg was opened in 2000.
  • In 2004 the 320 km/h Tampa-Miami Florida Overland Express opens. The same year a 4500 km 300 km/h line may also open from Melbourne to Darwin, Australia.
  • Most HSTs run on special straight tracks. Tilting trains lean into bends to give high speeds on winding old tracks.
  • Tilting trains include the 300 km/h Italian Fiat Pendolini and the Swedishbuilt X2000.
  • In 2000 the 240 km/h tilting train The American Flyer — Washington to Baltimore — became the USA’s fastest train.
  • Many cities now have short monorails, but they seem unlikely to get much bigger because of the disruption the building work would cause.
  • •The first practical electric trains date from 1879, but they only became widespread in the 1920s.
  • Electric locos pick up electric current either from a third ‘live’ rail or from overhead cables.
  • To pick up power from overhead cables, locos need a spring-loaded frame or pantograph to keep in contact.
  • Electric trains are clean and powerful and are also able to travel faster than other trains.
  • Older systems mostly used Direct Current (DC) motors, operating at 1500-3000 volts for overhead cables and 700 volts for live rails.
  • High-speed trains like France’s TGV and Japan’s Shinkansen use ‘three-phase’ Alternating Current (AC) motors operating at 25,000 volts.
  • The Paris—London Eurostar train works on 25,000 volt AC overhead cables in France, and 750 volt live rails after it comes out of the Channel Tunnel in England.
  • Magnetic levitation or maglev trains do not have wheels but glide along supported by electromagnets.
  • In electrodynamic maglevs, the train rides on repulsing magnets. In electromagnetic maglevs, they hang from attracting magnets.
  • Maglevs are used now only for short, low-speed trains, but they may one day be the fastest of all. High-speed maglev developments now use `superconducting’ electromagnets which arc costly to make. Rut a new idea is to use long strings of ordinary permanent magnets.
  • Railways were invented long before steam power.
  • The Diolkos was a 6 km-long railway that transported boats across the Corinthisthmus in Greece in the 6th-century BC. Trucks pushed by slaves ran in grooves in a limestone track.
  • The Diolkos ran for over 1300 years until AD 900.
  • Railways were revived in the 14th century with wooden tracks to guide horse and hand carts taking ore out of mines.
  • In the 1700s English iron makers began to make rails using iron. First they used wood covered in iron. Then later, the whole rail was made of iron. Iron wheels with ‘flanges’ (lips) ran inside the track.
  • The successful design of Trevithick’s engine in 1804 meant that railways became the main form of transportation. In 1804 Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick built the first successful steam railway locomotive.
  • Trevithick’s engine pulled a train of five wagons with 9 tons of iron and 70 men along 15 km of track at the Pendarren ironworks in Wales.
  • On 27 September 1825 George and Robert Stephenson opened the world’s first steam passenger railway, the Stockton and Darlington in England.
  • The gauge (track width) used for the Stockton and Darlington was 1.44 in, the same length as axles on horse-wagons. This became the standard gauge in the USA and much of Europe.
  • The English-built Stourbridge Lion was the first full-size steam locomotive to run in the USA. It ran on wooden track in Pennsylvania in 1829.
  • The fastest steam train ever was the Mallard designed by Gresley (see steam locomotives). It pulled seven coaches at a speed of 201 km/hr on 3 July 1938.
  • The most powerful steam loco was the US Virginian Railway’s No. 700. It pulled with a force of over 90,000 kg.
  • The heaviest trains ever pulled by a single locomotive were 250-truck trains that ran on the Erie Railroad in the USA from 1914 to 1929. They weighed over 15,000 tons.
  • The longest train was a 7.3 km 660-truck train that ran from Saldanha to Sishen in South Africa on 26 August 1989.
  • The longest passenger train was a 1732 m 70-coach train that travelled from Ghent to Ostend in Belgium on 27 April 1991.
  • The fastest speed recorded by a diesel train was 248 km/h, achieved by a British Rail Intercity 125 travelling between Darlington and York on 1 November 1987.
  • The fastest scheduled service is the Hiroshima to Kokura bullet train in Japan which covers 192 km in 44 minutes at an average 261.8 km/h.
  • The TGV from Lille to Roissy in France covers 203 km in 48 mins at an average 254.3 km/h.
  • The fastest train speed ever was 515.3 km/h by the TGV between Courtalain and Tours, France on 18 May 1990.
  • The fastest speed on rail was 9851 km/h by a rocket sled on White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico in October 1982.

This entry is filed under Interesting Facts.

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