I’ve been wondering about this question for a long time. Every single car in a train has its own brakes, so the train should stop in the same distance that it takes one car to stop. Why is this not the case? Or does each car take a mile to stop on its own?
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It’s the same thing as trains accelerating up to speed, there’s a lot of weight that has to come to a stop.
While yes there is a lot of contact area spread out between all the steel wheels, it’s still not enough to make stopping all that weight, with all that momentum any kind of quickly or efficiently.
IIRC passenger trains (think Amtrak or subways in the USA) have extra braking mechanisms built into the rails at each station to help bring them to a stop (please correct me if I’m wrong)
Freight trains, the big several miles long ones, only have the car brakes and again there is an immense amount of mass and momentum that has to be slowed and stopped. So if they try to stop quickly, all that’s going to happen is the wheels will slide across the rails.
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