Ten Things You Didn't Know About Trains

Jacqueline and I heard and felt a train pass by tonight when we took Midnight to the vet.  Here are ten things you might not know about the "iron horse".

1.  Horsepower was used as a marketing tool for the train.

2.  A train once lost a race to a horse.

3.  Trains helped the North win the Civil War in 1865.

4.  "Sherman neckties" were the miles of twisted railroad tracks that the Union Army left in its wake in the Confederacy during the Civil War.

5.   Abraham Lincoln's funeral, the same year, helped publicize train travel.

6.   The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, launched in 1830, was the first American Railroad.

7.  Thomas Cook, a travel agent, sold 3 million train tickets per year by 1890.

8.  Train travel led to the creation of the time zones.

9.  The miles of railroad in the United States peaked in the year 1916 at 250,000 miles.  That was enough track to reach from the earth to the moon. 

10. The bullet train, which first appeared in Tokyo, Japan in 1964 to coincide with the Winter Olympics, reaches speeds of 300 miles per hour.


Source:  www.history.com.