Trains Facts

Japanese engineers were asked to redesign the front end of the Bullet Train because it carried enough speed to create a sonic boom whenever it exited a tunnel. Residents could feel the blast from miles away.

In November 2017, the Tsukuba Express line in Japan issued a formal public apology after a train departed Minami-Nagareyama station 20 seconds ahead of schedule. Not 20 minutes. Twenty seconds. The statement read: "We sincerely apologize for the great inconvenience." Not a single passenger had complained.

A man's leg slipped into the gap between a train carriage and the platform at Stirling Station in Perth, Australia. Railway workers tried for ten minutes and couldn't free him. So they asked the crowd for help. Around 50 strangers lined up against the carriage and pushed together. The train tilted sideways. He walked free - unhurt.

Tama was a stray calico cat near Kishi Station in Japan when the railway was about to close. The company made her stationmaster in 2007, paying her salary in cat food. Over 8 years she was promoted 4 more times - ending as the company's third-highest executive. She drew 55,000 extra riders in her first year alone and saved the line. When she died in 2015, thousands attended her funeral.

Americans filled a 700-boxcar train with food for war-torn France in 1947. It came entirely from ordinary citizens, not the government. France answered two years later with 49 boxcars of its own, one for every state. Six million French and Italian donors packed them with 52,000 gifts. Air Force jets and fireboats greeted it in New York Harbor. Most of those boxcars are still around today, kept in museums nationwide.

Kate Shelley was a teenager when an 1881 storm collapsed a trestle near her Iowa home. A passenger train with 200 people aboard was still coming. She crawled across a flooded railroad bridge on her hands and knees, lantern blown out. She reached the depot in time to stop the train. Railroads gave her a lifetime pass and a Tiffany medal. Today, Union Pacific trains still cross the bridge that bears her name.

Union Pacific's Big Boy No. 4014 is the largest steam locomotive running anywhere on Earth: 1.2 million pounds, 133 feet long. Only 8 of the 25 ever built survive, and only this one still runs. For 51 years it just sat as a park exhibit in Pomona, California. Union Pacific rebuilt it and put it back on the rails. This summer it crossed 14 states and 7,145 miles for America's 250th birthday. It is still running.

Passenger trains to the Grand Canyon stopped running in 1968. Cars had won. The tracks from Williams, Arizona sat abandoned for 20 years, torn up for scrap. Max and Thelma Biegert bought the dead line anyway. They rebuilt 65 miles of track and both depots, replacing 30,000 ties. Service relaunched on September 17, 1989, 88 years to the day after the first one. A train still leaves Williams for the South Rim every morning.