Assume you can hook every locomotive and car Union Pacific owns up into a single gigantic freight train. Safety and laws aside, would it work?
In: Physics
Technical: There’s a limit with the effective range of distributed power. It operates via radio so the lead locomotive can give directions to the mid and tail end units. My railway doesn’t like it more than three miles away because it’s a pain in the ass when it loses communication, of course cars can be added behind a DP unit and there are very open places without a lot of interference that could easily extend the functional range of DP so this is a factor but ultimately a loose peg at determining the true max length of a train.
Logistic: Trains travel between major cities, they require places to stop, sure you can stop all other traffic and send one over sized train across the subdivision but it is a massive encumbrance if you have literally 0 places your train fits across 150 miles of track, so much so that this often defines the max length for particular subdivisions.
Handling: Trains have in train forces: buff and draft. Longer trains are harder to manage particularly over more challenging terrain on a two mile long train it’s not uncommon to go over pieces of territory where the train is straddled over two or three changes in grade. It’s possible to poorly marshall (organize) a train so badly that it just cannot go across a troublesome stretch of track without breaking the train, we usually learn from our mistakes and make tedious rules to try and eliminate this kind of gross incompetence.
Equipment: You can only put so many engines online in a consist of engines, 2-5 depending on a lot of factors. You can only have so many distributed consists. So there is a hard limit on the amount of engines a particular railway can use in a single train.
Trains operate using air brakes. Have you ever tried connecting straws together and blowing through them as a child? You get leakage, you can’t suck up someone’s drink from 15 straws away without getting lots of extra air bubbles in at each of the joints, trains are kinda like that. On a nice summer day you might run 12,000ft of train to a single air source no problemo but in the cold it changes, I’ve seen it as bad as 2000ft to an air source to move.
So you take all these things I’ve just talked about and factor them all together the world record holder is likely to be: fair weathered, in a place without lots of crossings and flatter or at least smoother terrain is better. Which I believe is currently held by BHP of Australia with a 4.5 mile long train.
99,732 Tons, 682 cars, 8 x 6000hp engines, 4.5 miles in length.
As a guy who runs trains all the time there aren’t a lot of trains I’m dying to run. I wish I could run this absolute nutter of a train…just once. I’m just over here kicking the wheels on my wimpy 30,000 ton train.
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