107 Fun Facts About Railroad

Which Cornish engineer built the steam locomotive that made the world's first railway journey, at Penydarren in 1804?

Richard Trevithick's engine hauled ten tons of iron and seventy men along the tramroad, but it proved too heavy for the brittle iron rails and the line went back to horses.

Which English railway, opened in 1825 to carry coal to the coast, was engineered by George Stephenson?

Stockton and Darlington's promoter Edward Pease planned to pull the coal wagons with horses until Stephenson persuaded him to use steam locomotives.

Stephenson's Rocket won which 1829 competition to pick locomotives for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway?

The Rainhill Trials offered £500 to settle whether locomotives, rope-hauling stationary engines or horses should work the line; five engines competed and Rocket won.

Which raw material was the Liverpool and Manchester Railway built to carry to Manchester's mills?

Cotton poured into Liverpool's docks for Manchester's mills, and merchants backed a railway because canal carriage between the two towns was costly.

What is the width of standard-gauge track, used by about 60 percent of the world's railways?

1,435 mm, or 4 ft 8½ in, is the Stephenson gauge inherited from early English colliery lines; Russian railways use 1,520 mm and India's broad gauge is 1,676 mm.

Where was the ceremonial last spike of America's first transcontinental railroad driven on May 10, 1869?

Promontory Summit, Utah: the gold spike was only tapped with a silver-plated maul, and when officials swung at the real iron spike they missed, yet the telegraph flashed 'done' anyway.

Which US president signed the Pacific Railroad Act that authorised the first transcontinental line?

Abraham Lincoln signed the Act on 1 July 1862; it chartered a new company to build west from the Missouri River and granted land and government bonds for every mile of track laid.

Which immigrant workforce did the Central Pacific favour for the brutal Sierra Nevada work?

Chinese labourers, most recruited from Guangdong, were paid less than white crews and had to buy their own food; in June 1867 some 3,000 of them downed tools for a week to demand better terms.

The golden spike of 1869 is now displayed at which university, founded by the railroad president who tapped it?

Stanford University's art museum holds it: the gold spike was lifted out right after the ceremony so an ordinary iron one could take its place, and donor David Hewes gave it to the new campus in 1892.

Which line of more than 9,000 km from Moscow to Vladivostok is the longest in the world?

The Trans-Siberian once had a gap in the middle: until a line around Lake Baikal was built, an icebreaking ferry carried passengers and freight across the water.

The Orient Express began service in 1883 between Paris and, eventually, which eastern terminus?

Istanbul, then called Constantinople: in 1883 passengers left the train at the Black Sea port of Varna and finished the trip by steamer, and the whole journey went by rail only from 1889.

Under what title was Agatha Christie's 1934 Orient Express mystery first published in the United States?

Murder in the Calais Coach reached American readers first as a Saturday Evening Post serial in autumn 1933, months before the book appeared in Britain under its now-famous title.

George Pullman's name became a byword for which kind of American railway car?

The sleeping car: sleepers already existed but were cramped and stuffy, so Pullman rebuilt two day coaches in 1859 and went on to make comfortable overnight travel his business.

Which American Railway Union leader was jailed for defying a court order during the Pullman Strike?

Eugene Debs led a boycott of Pullman cars after the company cut wages by about a quarter but left rents in its company town unchanged; troops broke the strike and he served six months.

Japan's first Shinkansen line opened just nine days before which event?

The Tokyo Summer Olympics opened on 10 October 1964, nine days after the first bullet trains cut the trip between Tokyo and Osaka from nearly seven hours to four.

Which country's L0 Series maglev set the world rail speed record of 603 km/h in 2015?

Japan's L0 Series broke its own week-old record on a test track near Mount Fuji; it is being built for a new maglev line meant to link the capital with Nagoya in about 40 minutes.

The 574.8 km/h wheeled-train world record was set in 2007 by a modified version of which train?

France's TGV: the record train, a special set called V150, ran on larger wheels than usual, and the overhead line was boosted from 25,000 to 31,000 volts for the attempt.

The world's first commercial maglev opened in 1984 as a short airport shuttle in which city?

Birmingham: the shuttle floated passengers 600 metres between the airport and the main-line station from 1984 until 1995, when it had grown so unreliable that a bus took its place.

The Shanghai maglev, once the fastest passenger service at about 430 km/h, uses technology from which country?

Germany's Transrapid technology floats the trains from Pudong airport on magnets, yet the line planned at home for Munich's airport was scrapped in 2008 when its costs soared.

Which steam locomotive set the world steam speed record of 126 mph in 1938?

Mallard hit 126 mph on Stoke Bank on 3 July 1938, but the effort overheated its middle bearing, and it had to come off the train at Peterborough for repairs.

Which famous steam locomotive became the first officially authenticated at 100 mph, in 1934?

Flying Scotsman reached 100 mph on a test run on 30 November 1934; when British Railways retired it in 1963, businessman Alan Pegler bought it and saved it from the scrapyard.

Which president signed the law that created Amtrak?

Richard Nixon signed the Rail Passenger Service Act in 1970, and the next spring almost every private railroad handed its dwindling passenger trains to the new federally backed corporation.

As of 2025, Amtrak's Acela, America's fastest train, runs on which route?

The Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston lets Acela reach top speed only in short bursts: curves, century-old bridges and tunnels, and tracks shared with slower trains hold it back.

Which line opened in London on 10 January 1863 as the world's first underground passenger line?

The Metropolitan Railway was built by trenching the streets, lining the cut with brick and roofing it over; its steam engines filled the tunnels with fumes, yet the line was a success from the start.

Who designed the schematic London Tube map in 1931?

Harry Beck, a draughtsman who drew electrical schematics for the Underground, saw his diagram rejected at first as too radical before it was issued as a pocket map in January 1933.

Which British rail company first standardised its timetable on Greenwich Mean Time, in 1840?

The Great Western Railway put its whole system on London time in November 1840; until then every town kept its own local time, and Bristol's clocks ran about ten minutes behind London's.

North American railroads introduced standard time zones on 18 November 1883, a date nicknamed what?

The Day of Two Noons: on 18 November 1883 clocks were reset as standard noon reached each zone, and in the eastern parts of each zone local noon had already passed, so noon struck twice.

The Channel Tunnel's French terminal at Coquelles sits beside which port city?

Calais: at the Coquelles terminal beside the city, cars and lorries drive onto shuttle trains that reach Folkestone in about 35 minutes; some 38 km of the tunnel runs under the sea.

Which 57 km Swiss tunnel became the world's longest rail tunnel on opening in 2016?

The Gotthard Base Tunnel runs more than 2 km beneath the Alps at its deepest, so trains take a flat, straight path in place of the old winding climb to a higher tunnel.

Which line holds the record for the highest point on any railway, 5,072 m above sea level?

The Qinghai–Tibet railway tops out at the Tanggula Pass, and with some 960 km of track above 4,000 m its carriages carry an oxygen supply for passengers.

India's first passenger train steamed out to Thane in 1853 from which city?

Bombay: on 16 April 1853 a 21-gun salute sent the train off from Bori Bunder station, and three locomotives hauled its 14 carriages and 400 guests to Thane.

The world's longest dead-straight stretch of railway track is in which country?

Australia: the Trans-Australian Railway crosses the Nullarbor Plain, a limestone plateau so flat and treeless that the rails run for hundreds of kilometres without a single curve.

The Adelaide-to-Darwin passenger train is said to be named after which group?

Afghan camel drivers: cameleers known as 'Afghans' worked the outback in the nineteenth century, and the old train to Alice Springs was nicknamed the Afghan Express, later cut to The Ghan.

Which Swiss train between Zermatt and St. Moritz is called the slowest express train in the world?

The Glacier Express takes about eight hours to cover its 291 km, and it ran only in summer until 1982, when a tunnel under the snowbound Furka Pass let it run all year.

Which New York station has 44 platforms, more than any other railway station in the world?

Grand Central Terminal was nearly gutted for a 55-storey tower planned on top of it; a campaign joined by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and a decade of lawsuits saved the building.

The locomotive cowcatcher is often credited to which nineteenth-century computing pioneer?

Charles Babbage, better known for designing mechanical calculating engines, proposed the idea, but the first working cowcatcher is usually credited to Isaac Dripps, who fitted one to the John Bull in New Jersey.

Which Illinois Central engineer became a folk hero by staying at the controls as his express crashed in 1900?

Casey Jones stayed aboard to slow his train before it struck a stalled freight at Vaughan, Mississippi; a ballad begun by engine wiper Wallace Saunders turned the wreck into legend.

Which Great Train Robber escaped prison in 1965 and spent decades as a fugitive in Brazil?

Ronnie Biggs climbed out of Wandsworth Prison 15 months into a 30-year sentence, had his face altered by plastic surgery, and lived openly in Rio until he flew home to be arrested in 2001.

The first peacetime train robbery in the United States took place in 1866 in which state?

Indiana: on 6 October 1866 the Reno Gang boarded an Ohio & Mississippi train as it left Seymour and threw a safe from the express car, taking more than $10,000.

In the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862, Union raiders in Georgia stole which locomotive?

The General was seized at Big Shanty and run down by Confederates aboard the Texas; soldiers among the raiders later became the first men ever awarded the Medal of Honor.

Glenn Miller's 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' from 1941 was the first recording to receive what?

A gold record: RCA Victor handed it to Miller in February 1942 for about 1.2 million sales, a publicity gesture made 16 years before the record industry set up its official gold award.

Thomas the Tank Engine works on the North Western Railway on which island?

Sodor, an imaginary island between Barrow-in-Furness and the Isle of Man; Awdry invented it after noting that the Anglican diocese of 'Sodor and Man' had no actual Sodor.

Which actor played multiple roles in Robert Zemeckis's motion-capture film The Polar Express (2004)?

Tom Hanks gave body and voice performances for the conductor, the hobo, Santa Claus and more, acting on a bare stage in motion-capture gear so animators could build each character over him.

India's two-foot-gauge 'toy train', a World Heritage Site since 1999, climbs to which hill station?

Darjeeling: the line climbs about 2,000 m by looping over itself three times and reversing up six zigzags, passing Ghum station at 2,258 m on the way.

The Semmering line in Austria, completed in 1854, is generally called the world's first true what?

Mountain railway: the Semmering crosses 41 km of Alpine terrain on viaducts and tunnels built so well in 1848–54 that main-line trains still use them today.

As of 2025, which country has by far the world's longest high-speed rail network?

China opened nearly all of its high-speed lines after 2007, yet the network already runs to tens of thousands of kilometres, far more than any other country's.

Japan's first railway opened in 1872 between Tokyo and which treaty port?

Yokohama: British engineer Edmund Morel oversaw the building of the line but died before it opened, and its first steam trains took 53 minutes for the trip.

As of 2025, which Florida service is the only privately owned and operated intercity passenger railroad in the United States?

Brightline began running in South Florida in 2018; America's private railroads had handed nearly all their passenger trains to federally supported Amtrak decades earlier.

A caboose was traditionally coupled where on a North American freight train?

At the end: the caboose brought up the rear so the conductor and flagman could watch the train ahead for shifting loads and hot axle boxes and protect it from behind.

George Westinghouse made his name in 1869 with which railway safety invention?

The air brake let the engineer stop every car at once from the cab, replacing hand brakes that crews had to set car by car; in 1893 Congress made it compulsory on American trains.

Which politician was fatally struck by a locomotive at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway?

William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool, had climbed down to greet the Duke of Wellington at Parkside when Rocket came along the other line and crushed his leg; he died that evening at Eccles.

Before its 2007 move to St Pancras, Eurostar ran to Paris and Brussels from which London station?

Waterloo was Eurostar's London terminus from 1994; the 2007 switch to a new high-speed line into St Pancras cut the trip to Paris to about 2 hours 15 minutes.

Which carmaker built the 1939 FT diesel that began the end of American steam?

General Motors built its four-unit FT demonstrator in 1939; it convinced many railroads that diesel was the future of freight, and after the war diesels rapidly replaced steam.

The first railway to link the Atlantic and Pacific, opened in 1855, crossed which present-day country?

Panama: the line was built in the rush to reach California's goldfields, and its Atlantic terminus grew into the city of Colón.

Which Canadian railway's last spike was driven at Craigellachie, British Columbia, in 1885?

Canadian Pacific: director Donald Smith bent the first spike with a bad swing at Craigellachie on 7 November 1885, and had to drive a second one to finish the transcontinental line.

The Diolkos, a grooved stone trackway from around 600 BC, carried boats across which isthmus?

Corinth: the Diolkos let ships or their cargoes be dragged on wheeled cradles across the Isthmus of Corinth, saving the voyage round the Peloponnese; grooves cut into the limestone guided the wheels.

How did Salamanca, the first commercially successful steam locomotive, grip the rails in 1812?

With a cog-wheel on a toothed rail: Blenkinsop's patent rack, laid along one side of the Middleton Railway in Leeds, let a five-ton engine pull coal trains many times its own weight.

Which fish-catching bird's beak was the model for the long nose of Japan's 500 Series bullet train?

Kingfisher beaks gave engineers the streamlined shape for the train's front. It is one of the best-known cases of biomimicry, where designers copy nature to solve a problem.

Tama, appointed stationmaster of Japan's Kishi Station in 2007 and fitted with a custom hat, was what animal?

A cat called Tama greeted passengers at the rural stop, and the publicity lifted ridership by 17 percent in her first month. A study credited her with adding 1.1 billion yen to the local economy.

Which Beatle narrated the first two series of the children's television show Thomas & Friends?

Ringo Starr got the job because producer Britt Allcroft found his voice perfect for the stories. His years of pop fame played no part in her choice.

Peter Cooper's Tom Thumb, an early American steam locomotive, famously lost a race against what?

A horse pulling a rail car won only because a belt slipped off the engine's blower and the boiler lost power. Until then the little locomotive had been pulling easily ahead.

Building of a Uganda Railway bridge over the Tsavo River was halted by attacks from a pair of what?

Lions without manes dragged workers from their tents at night for nine months until both were shot. Their skins spent 25 years as floor rugs before a museum bought and mounted them.

Which future independence leader was thrown out of a first-class train carriage at Pietermaritzburg?

Mahatma Gandhi, then a young lawyer, spent the night shivering in the station, weighing whether to sail home or stay and protest for his rights. He stayed in South Africa for 21 years.

From which London terminus does the Hogwarts Express depart in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books?

King's Cross is where the stories hide Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. The films shot the exterior at St Pancras next door, because temporary buildings covered the real facade until 2012.

Which board game lets players buy four railroads, including the Reading and the Short Line?

Monopoly's Short Line was never a railroad at all. The name is a trimmed version of the Shore Fast Line, a streetcar route that served Atlantic City.

Who escaped slavery in Maryland and became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad?

Harriet Tubman made some 13 return missions and led about 70 people to freedom. The network she used had no tracks or trains, only safe houses and antislavery activists.

Which breed was Hachikō, the dog who waited at a Japanese station for years after his owner died?

Akita dogs reached America because of him. After Hachikō's story spread around the world, Helen Keller brought the first one home.

Which marmalade-loving children's book character is found by the Brown family at a London railway station?

Paddington Bear owes his luggage label to wartime memories. Author Michael Bond recalled evacuee children leaving London with a name tag round the neck and one small case each.

Which hero of American legend out-hammered a steam-powered rock drill, then died from the effort?

John Henry was a steel driver, hammering drills into rock to make holes for the explosives that blasted out railroad tunnels. A plaque in Talcott, West Virginia, celebrates the legend.

Who directed Strangers on a Train, the 1951 thriller about two passengers who discuss swapping murders?

Alfred Hitchcock took the story from a Patricia Highsmith novel published only a year earlier. Crime writer Raymond Chandler was among those who worked on the script.

Which detective solves a killing on a snowbound train in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express?

Hercule Poirot's stalled train had a real model. In February 1929 a blizzard in Turkey held up the actual service for six days, only months after Christie first rode it.

Which heroine of a classic Russian novel ends her life by throwing herself under a freight train?

Anna Karenina's death mirrors her first meeting with Vronsky, when a railway worker is killed by a moving carriage. Tolstoy runs stations and journeys through the whole book as a motif.

Which US city's rapid transit system is nicknamed the L because most of it runs on elevated track?

Chicago opened the oldest sections in 1892, making the L the second-oldest rapid transit system in the Americas. Parts of it now run in subway tunnels and open cuts.

Which US city runs the world's last manually operated cable car system, a National Historic Landmark?

San Francisco's cars carry no motor: each grips a cable running below the street through a slit between the rails. Only three of the 23 lines built by 1890 survive.

Which country has a railway station whose full 58-character name begins Llanfairpwllgwyngyll?

Wales owes the giant name to a stunt. It is said to have been contrived in 1869 to give the village the longest station name in Britain and win some publicity.

Which material do locomotives drop on the rails in front of their driving wheels to improve grip?

Sand has to be bone dry to run freely down the pipes. British engine sheds kept special drying stoves so that every sandbox could be refilled each morning.

Which member of a steam locomotive's crew shovelled the coal that kept the boiler making steam?

The fireman kept that title on the railways, while the same job at sea was usually called stoker. On big engines the fire was often lit hours earlier by separate fire lighters.

Which rail vehicle, coupled behind a steam locomotive, carries its supply of fuel and water?

Tender tanks on some main lines were refilled without stopping. A scoop was lowered into a trough between the rails, and the engine's own speed forced the water up.

Which type of railway hauls two counterbalanced cars up and down a steep slope on one cable?

Funicular cars are fixed to opposite ends of the same cable, which loops over a pulley at the top. The weight of the one going down helps to lift the one coming up.

What name is given to the bed of crushed stone that holds railway track in place and drains water?

Ballast shares its name with the heavy stones once loaded into ships to keep them stable. Packed around the track, it spreads the load of passing trains and keeps down weeds.

Small gaps are deliberately left between the ends of jointed rails to allow for what?

Heat expansion makes steel rails grow in hot weather, and the gaps give them room. The same joints make the clickety-clack sound as wheels pass over them.

Train wheels have a slightly cone-shaped running surface mainly so that each pair on an axle can do what?

A coned pair of wheels can steer itself. On a bend the outer wheel rides on a wider part of its cone and covers more ground per turn, so the pair follows the track.

In a diesel-electric locomotive, the engine turns no wheels directly and instead drives what?

A generator turns the engine's power into electricity for the traction motors that actually move the locomotive. Larger modern units use an alternator and rectifier in its place.

Which roof-mounted apparatus lets an electric train collect power through contact with an overhead line?

Pantograph is a borrowed name: some designs resemble the jointed copying instrument once used to trace handwriting and drawings. It was developed to keep contact with the wire at much higher speeds.

Dry goods clerk Eli Janney whittled from wood the first model of which railroad device?

The knuckle coupler was patented in 1873 as an alternative to the link and pin. Twenty years later Congress passed the Safety Appliance Act, which required automatic couplers.

Which inventor patented the railway air brake before battling Thomas Edison over electric power?

George Westinghouse got the idea after seeing a wreck in which two crews saw each other coming but could not stop. Until then brakemen ran along the car roofs setting each brake by hand.

Which Victorian engineer of record-breaking steamships laid his main railway line to a 7-foot broad gauge?

Isambard Brunel believed the wide track would run better at high speed, and his trains were for a time the fastest in the world. Its mismatch with other lines became a lasting problem.

Which American dynasty was founded by the Commodore, who sold his ships in 1864 to focus on railroads?

The Vanderbilts' founder, Cornelius, got his nickname in jest from rival boat captains struck by his energy. He went on to build one of the largest fortunes in American history.

Which railroad, founded by merchants in 1827, became America's first steam-operated common carrier?

Baltimore and Ohio was both the name and the plan: tracks from a busy Atlantic port west to a suitable point on a great inland river. Two states chartered the company in the same year.

Which outlaw's gang turned to train robbery in 1873 by derailing a Rock Island Line train near Adair, Iowa?

Jesse James rode with the Younger brothers, and the gang got away with about $3,000 from the wrecked train. Until then the outlaws had been known for holding up banks.

Which revolutionary left Zurich in 1917 on a so-called sealed train to return to Russia from exile?

Vladimir Lenin's train was never truly sealed. That was an agreed cover story, and the passengers even got off to spend a night in Frankfurt on the way.

The railway carriage used to sign the 1918 armistice that ended World War I stood in which French forest?

Compiègne saw the scene replayed in reverse in 1940. Hitler had the same carriage taken from its museum and set on the exact spot so that France would sign its own armistice inside it.

Which 1896 Supreme Court case began when a man deliberately sat in a whites-only train car in New Orleans?

Plessy v. Ferguson was an arranged test case. A citizens' committee recruited Homer Plessy to break Louisiana's Separate Car Act, and the train was stopped as planned so he could be removed.

Which labour leader unionised the Pullman porters in 1925 and later headed the 1963 March on Washington?

A. Philip Randolph signed up more than half the porters within a year, and the company answered with firings and violence. His union was the first successful one led by African Americans.

Which travel pioneer started out in 1841 with a rail excursion for temperance campaigners from Leicester?

Thomas Cook took several hundred temperance supporters by special train to a meeting in Loughborough. The idea had struck him on a 15-mile walk: the new railways could serve the cause of sobriety.

Which physicist's effect did Buys Ballot test in 1845 with musicians playing aboard a moving Dutch train?

The Doppler effect had been proposed only three years earlier, in a treatise on the coloured light of double stars. The players held one calibrated note on the line between Utrecht and Amsterdam.

The Empire Builder passenger train is named for the nickname of which Great Northern Railway tycoon?

James J. Hill pushed his line to the West Coast without public money, and it was one of the few transcontinental railroads that never went bankrupt. The train took his name in 1929.

Which board game by Alan R. Moon has players collect coloured cards to claim rail routes between cities?

Ticket to Ride is the world's highest-selling train game. The first edition came out in 2004 and won that year's Spiel des Jahres, the coveted Game of the Year award.

Which Scottish railway crossing, opened in 1890, gave Britain a phrase for a job that never ends?

The Forth Bridge saying rests on a mistaken belief that repainting began again the moment it was finished. A coating applied between 2001 and 2011 was designed to last 25 years.

Which bandleader's orchestra adopted Take the 'A' Train, written by Billy Strayhorn, as its signature tune?

Duke Ellington had sent Strayhorn directions to his house by subway, and their opening words became the title. His son recalled finding a discarded draft of the tune in a trash can.

Which composer wrote Starlight Express, the 1984 musical whose cast play racing trains on roller skates?

Andrew Lloyd Webber first chased the idea in 1974, when he asked the author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books about an animated series. The skates were the designer's suggestion.

Which South Korean director made Snowpiercer, set aboard a train endlessly circling a frozen Earth?

Bong Joon-ho made his English-language debut with the story, shooting in a Prague studio on carriage sets mounted on gimbals to copy a train's motion.

Which Hollywood studio boss let house guests ride and drive the miniature steam railroad in his back yard?

Walt Disney's back-yard line led to something much bigger. It inspired him to put railroad attractions into his plans for Disneyland.

Frecciarossa, a name meaning red arrow, is the premier high-speed train of which country?

Italy adopted the name in 2008 for a service previously called Eurostar Italia. Slower sister brands took silver and white arrows: Frecciargento and Frecciabianca.

Japan's Seikan Tunnel carries trains beneath the Tsugaru Strait from Honshu to which other island?

Hokkaido's train ferries sailed until the tunnel opened in 1988. A 1954 typhoon sank several of them in the strait, killing more than 1,400 people, and pushed the railway to speed up its tunnel study.

Which poet wrote the rhyming verse commentary for Night Mail, the 1936 documentary about a postal train?

W. H. Auden was earning £3 a week at the GPO film department, less than he had made as a schoolteacher. The score came from a 22-year-old Benjamin Britten.

Which painter's Rain, Steam and Speed shows a train rushing across a Thames bridge in a summer rainstorm?

J. M. W. Turner tucked a hare into the bottom right corner, running along the track. He was among the few painters of his day to treat industrial progress as a worthy subject.