Railway Track facts
While investigating facts about Railway Track, I found out little known, but curios details like:
The world's longest stretch of railway that is perfectly straight is in Australia. This stretch of straight track measures 478 kilometers in length.
The first melodrama to have a villain tie someone to a railway track, then be rescued in the nick of time, was Under the Gaslight (1867)
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 28 of the best facts about Railway Track I managed to collect.
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In 2000 the Oresund Bridge was opened, connecting both sides of the strait permanently. It originates in Copenhagen in Denmark and runs 5 miles to an artificial island that turns the bridge into an underwater tunnel that runs 2.5 miles to Malmo in Sweden. It is a double track railway and a motorway for transporting people back and forth between the two countries. There is a toll to use the bridge and tunnel.
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The Swiss National Railway (SBB) uses sheep to mow thousands of acres of embankments along the tracks
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Thieves stole 6 miles(=10km) of a working railway track between Johannesburg and Nigel, South Africa, in July 2014.
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In 1916 there were 254,000 miles of railway track in the United States. Today there are less than 170,000.
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A "Union Station" in the US is a railway station where tracks and facilities are shared by two or more separate railway companies. That's why so many large cities have a train terminal called Union Station.
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China is planning a railway track from Xi'an in Central China to Venice in Europe called "The New Silk Road", which connects to "The New Maritime Silk Road", ultimately forming a looping traderoute over three continents.
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Animals (especially bears) are attracted to railway tracks because of spilled grain and many are killed because of it
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The Vatican has the world's shortest railway. It consists of two 300-meter tracks and one station; Citta del Vaticano. It's used for importing goods and is kept as a symbolic relic. No regular passenger trains run.
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The Schwerer Gustav is the biggest gun ever created. It took 2,000 men to fire it, sat on a railway track, and had 10,500lb artillery.
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The Canadian Pacific Railway has a flatbed truck with a jet engine attached to it that is used to quickly thaw frozen train track switches.
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One in 10 of Britain`s train carriages dispose toilet waste straight onto the railway tracks.
During WW2 a group of Polish saboteurs manged to blow up a section of mainline railway track between London-Cambridge. They were being trained by the British SOE and it was an accident. - source
Indian Railways uses bee noises to discourage elephants from crossing railway tracks. - source
A city in the South East of China called Chongqing in order to solve space issues built a light railway track through a hole in a 19-storey block of flats.
The two 10 year-olds who murdered British toddler James Bulger hit him at least 42 times before leaving his body on railway tracks to be sliced in half by a coming train. - source
You can detect a train in the railway tracks very far because the sound travels in one dimension, not three.
In Poland they play sounds of dogs barking on the side of their railway tracks in order to scare wild animals away from the tracks so that they do not get hit by trains.
In terms of railways, junction, central & terminus, all have different meanings. Junctions have at least 3 tracks for going out, Terminus has only 1 track of leaving ie tracks end at station & Central is the most important station of the multiple stations in a city.
Track 61 is a private railway platform for the Metro-North Railroad in New York City and is part of the Grand Central Terminal complex, located beneath the Waldorf Astoria New York hotel. It was first used by General John J. Pershing in 1938, and later by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944.
BNSF Railway - a corporation - owns so much land (32,500 miles of track) that they operate their own police force, with interstate authority granted by the federal government.
More than a hundred Indian nuclear scientists have died off on mysterious circumstances. One of them was found dead poisoned on a railway track.
