I’ve googled it but just can’t seem to grasp it. How do they stay on as well as they do at such high speeds, with so few incidents of crashing or derailing? Especially when anything could be lying across the track waiting to get lodged in the wheels.
I hear so often that trains are so safe, but I don’t think I can get over my anxiety with them until I understand *why* they’re safe.
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Other users have discussed how the wheels are shaped and how the weight keeps it on the tracks, but I wanted to add another bit of information to help soothe your anxieties (courtesy of my dad, who works for the railroad, though I took what he told me and translated it into ELI5).
Trains have a LOT of wheels. Like, a ridiculous amount of them. Each car has at least two sets of ‘bougies’ (which is a set of two axels connected to each other, so four ‘wheels’ in total per bougie), and some have way more than that (like engines, each ‘bougie’ has three axels instead of two, so six ‘wheels’ per bougie and twelve ‘wheels’ overall per engine). If there is something big lying across the track (like a car, or even a semi), it *might* knock the first set of wheels loose from the tracks. Maybe. But because there’s so many wheels and most things that lay across train tracks waiting to get hit by a train is significantly smaller than a full-length train, even if the first pair of wheels gets knocked off the rest can just continue doing their job.
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