Here are 13 Interesting Facts About Trains.
If someone commits suicide in Japan by jumping onto an oncoming train, the train company can/will sue his/her family for cleanup fees, loss of income and negative publicity brought on by the suicide. Ore trains in Sweden traveling down to the coast generate five times the amount of electricity they use, powering nearby towns and the return trip for other trains.
Many ‘Ghost Trains’ run on the British Rail Network. These trains, often unadvertised, run extremely rarely, at obscure times, through bizarre routes, purely to keep the line officially open whilst discouraging passenger use. Ghost train hunters roam the country searching for them.
In Japan, trains are so punctual that any delay over 5 minutes usually incurs an apology and a “delay certificate” for passengers on their way to work. When trains are delayed for an hour or more, it may even make the news.
It is possible to travel from Portugal to Vietnam solely by train. At 17,000 km, this is the longest train journey in the world.
Hogwarts Express Train used in the Harry Potter movies is an actually train that runs even today in Scotland. The line winds through gorgeous settings, including highland valleys and besides lochs.
After WW1 the French had the railway cars that Germany surrendered in stored in a museum. During WW2 when France was preparing to surrender, Hitler ordered the walls of museum torn down and the railway cars returned to the exact spot of the 1918 armistice in order to humiliate the French.
The London Underground has its own implementation of the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), where the platforms are actually uphill from the surrounding track, so that the Kinetic Energy is turned into Gravitational Potential Energy, and recovered when the train leaves the station.
The fight scene on top of the train in Skyfall was actually filmed on top of a real moving train, and Daniel Craig did not use a stunt double.
In 1886, 3 people were killed and many more were injured in a Texas train company’s publicity stunt. They had invited the public to watch two of their trains crash head-on into one another at full speed, promising a good show.
Most train horns are based on musical chords. Common passenger trains found in the U.S. are usually based on major 6th chords, which are not as threatening as most freight trains, which are based on more dissonant, frightening , such as diminished 7th chords.
There is an abandoned subway station under City Hall in New York that no train stops at but you can see it in passing if you take the number 6 train.
In 1963, four Princeton students forced a local train to stop by parking a car on the tracks. With a gun loaded with blanks, they got on the train, picked four girls as their dates, and rode away with them on horseback.
When placed on maps using food sources as cities, slime molds have almost perfectly replicated major train systems in Europe, the USA, Tokyo, and Canada.
