Why does putting a carriage on rails make it much easier to pull? As in, how were the first trams such an improvement from omnibuses when the same weight was still being pulled?
In: 520
Three reasons.
There’s very little deformation in the wheels. If you’ve every tried to ride a bike with a flat tire or pumped the tire up hard to roll better, you know that the harder the wheel, the easier it rolls.
The track is very smooth and flat compared to a road surface. The train doesn’t have to waste energy climbing over bumps and out of potholes, even at the microscopic level.
The track is very well supported. Under very heavy loads, relatively soft road surfaces deform so that the truck is always going “uphill” to get out of the dent it creates when it presses down on the road. The design of the train and rails distributes the load over a wide area preventing most of the deformation.
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