Hey, Passengers!
Today is Train Day! Trains are an exciting, old-fashioned means of travel, still used for transporting goods on a daily basis these days. Trains are enthralling—pulling hundreds of tons of weight right along at a fairly speedy clip. Some trains pull as much as 500 tons! The steam locomotive was first invented in 1804, but trains were around before that even. How were they powered?
Horse Power
Before the steam locomotives, people actually attached horses to trains (they didn’t pull quite as much weight as trains do now, though!). The first steam engine hit 18 miles per house. On its first journey, the train riders came across owners of Stockton and Stokes, a stagecoach company who challenged the train to race one of their horses. The horse won after the locomotive ran out of juice.
Turbo Beetle
The Black Beetle (the lesser known beetle from the 60’s) was a passenger train that was tested in New York City, 1966. Engineers were experimenting to see what speeds they could achieve so they to a jet engine from a bomber and threw it on the back of the Beetle. Its test run reached over 180 miles per hour, but they quickly scrapped the project as it was too expensive.
Beetles VS Bullets
Just because they did away with The Black Beetle doesn’t mean further speeds weren’t achieved in years to come. Japan has The Shinkansen, or Japanese Bullet Train which gives its travelers an hour long ride from one side of the country to the other. How can that happen so quickly? Well, it travels at 200 miles per hour as the fastest train on Earth.
There’s a train that goes by not even a block from my house and I love hearing it pass by. Enjoy any trains going by that you may encounter today. As always, thanks for reading and happy camping!
- John