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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Cars are (relatively) light and have huge grippy rubber tyres rubbing on a grippy road surface.
Trains are heavy. Even a ‘light’ passenger train can clock in at 40 tons per coach, freight trains can weigh thousands of tons. They have metal wheels making tiny amounts of contact on a metal track. The upside of this is once they get going it’s very easy and efficient to keep them at that speed, the downside is that it takes a mile to stop.
TLDR: inertia.
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