On August 28, 1830, Peter Cooper, who built the Tom Thumb engine, accepted a challenge from a horse-drawn train. The Tom Thumb was undergoing testing when the race took place. The steam engine was lost due to a broken belt. 1)
Coast Starlight train running from Seattle to Los Angeles, along the west coast of the United States. One of the most famous American trains. It is worth the trip for the unforgettable landscapes along the coastline. Beautiful landscapes are not just the ocean - the train passes the Cascade Mountains, forests, and valleys along the way. 2)
The longest straight stretch of tracks is located in Australia. It is a 297-mile-long (478 kilometers) track across the Nullarbor Plain, a part of the Trans-Australian Railway. 3)
The longest name belongs to a train station in Anglesey in the UK called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. 4)
The busiest train station in Europe is said to be Gare du Nord in Paris. It serves around 250 million people per year! 5)
The Acela Express is a high-speed train that runs between Boston and Washington, DC. Along the way it stops at the following cities: New Haven - New York - Philadelphia - Baltimore. This is the fastest passenger train operated by Amtrak and the pride of the company. It reaches speeds of 150 miles per hour on the fastest sections. 6)
The trains that carry ore from the mines in the mountains in northern Sweden are 750 meters long and consist of almost 70 cars, which normally could only be pulled by an incredibly powerful electric locomotive. Here, however, the road from the mountains to the points of further raw material travel from ports in Sweden and Norway leads almost entirely downhill. This means that the train can roll over much of the way, using very little energy and recovering the energy generated by braking to store in batteries. 7)
Daylight Savings Time causes issues for some Amtrak trains. Trains running at 2 a.m. during the Fall time change are required to come to a full stop for one hour to allow clocks to catch up to the train schedule. 8)
After the president's assassination in 1865, Abraham Lincoln's body traveled through 180 cities in seven states before arriving in the president's hometown of Springfield, Illinois, to rest in his grave. The train, draped in black, was a huge advertising success for George Pullman, which, in addition to supplying cars for the funeral train, lent several of its Pullman Sleeper series cars to railroad companies that wanted to run the “Lincoln Specials” line to Springfield so that mourners could pay their last respects. 9)
California Zephyr is one of the most famous trains in the world. It runs from Chicago to Emeryville in the suburbs of San Francisco. The train is mainly chosen by tourists, who admire the beautiful scenery from the windows of the train passing through such places as the Rocky Mountains, the Cordillera, canyons, rushing rivers, and lakes. 10)
Many people were concerned about the dangers to the body that supposedly awaited a man traveling at tear-squeezing speeds of up to 50 miles per hour (80 km. There were theories that the human body would simply dissolve due to sheer speed. An even more disturbing concept was that at that speed women's uteruses would simply fly out of their bodies. And while you know that this turned out not to be true, in the world of Victorian-style travel, where passengers had to hold their hats so they wouldn't be swept away by the rush of air, this was initially seen as a very real health risk. 11)
Between 2001 and 2010, the New York City Transit Authority, instead of disposing of old subway trainsets, saved $30 million by turning them into new fish houses. During that period, 2,580 subway cars were taken to MTA workshops in Manhattan, dismantled, cleaned, loaded onto ships, and sunk off the coasts of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina, where they became the building blocks of artificial reefs, providing new habitats for undersea flora and fauna. 12)
One of Britain's most famous criminal transgressions, the Train Robbery of the Century, didn't get its name because it was the elaborately planned robbery of the century (in fact, it had pretty strong amateurish traits), but because of the amount of cash looted. On August 8, 1963, a gang of fifteen men attacked a mail train traveling from Glasgow to London, then escaped with £2.6 million worth of loot (the equivalent of today's £55 million or €61 million). 13)
The train of literary history may have taken a slightly different course as a result of events that took place one afternoon on June 9, 1865. Charles Dickens had just been on a trip with his lover Ellen Ternan (and, somewhat surprisingly, her mother) when the train in which all three were traveling derailed while crossing an overpass. Due to a misunderstanding, a section of track on the viaduct was removed, resulting in a train crash that killed ten passengers and injured 40. Dickens' wagon balanced on the edge of the viaduct, and he carefully climbed through the wreckage to safety, only to be reminded that he had left in the wagon the manuscript of the last part of a novel soon to be published in episodes. 14)
For example, Polesworth station in Warwickshire, which until the late 1980s offered six-weekday services, now offers only one - the 07:26 to Crewe. The train stops only when it is traveling north; it cannot stop on the southbound track because the bridge leading to that platform was demolished in 2005 and never rebuilt, making the platform inaccessible. 15)
Stations in the Czech Republic had their own identifying jingles, based on something distinctive to the locality. Unfortunately, these signals are slowly becoming a tune of the past. Each major station used to have its own unique story to tell just by these jingles, but Czech Railways is now abandoning them with the goal of introducing “greater uniformity across the network and less confusion for passengers”. 16)
If you're wealthy enough to own your own private rail car, you can travel in style all over the United States, as the Amtrak company will let you hook it up to trains operating regular train service between certain locations. While you don't have to buy a ticket (you save money), you do have to pay an annual registration fee for your private railcar, as well as an annual maintenance fee, charged depending on where you are and where you are going, as well as subsequent fees for any additional services you may need from the Amtrak company. 17)
Now enjoying a well-deserved retirement, the Wgasa Bush Line transported visitors around the outskirts of the San Diego Zoo for more than three decades. Andy Faust, son of zoo designer Chuck Faust, confirms the story. “Participants in a brainstorming session convened to come up with a name for the line ran out of ideas and came to an impenetrable wall. None of the ideas were good. Someone, apparently frustrated, threw out a “WGASA”, Who gives a sh*t anyway. Chuck Bieler, one of the zoo's official representatives, sent the name to the committee for approval. “WGASA” is just a great and African-sounding name. They responded: “It sounds great,” without having a clue what it meant. I was one of the few who had. The name has aroused many suppressed smiles over the years, but it has survived nonetheless”. 18)