How Many Cars Were There in the Longest Railroad Train?

Have you ever stopped to count the number of cars in a passing railroad train? If the train was a very long freight train, you may have counted more than 100 cars. But you would have to count for a long time to reach the number the cars in the longest railroad train of all time.

This train consisted of 500 coal cars and 6 engines, three pulling and three pushing, and traveled more than 150 miles in West Virginia in 1967. The train was about four miles long and probably weighed more than 90 million pounds!

If you were waiting at a railroad crossing while this train passed, you’d have plenty of time to count the cars. For if the train traveled by you at a speed of 12 miles per hour, it would take about 20 minutes to pass by!

The world’s longest rail line is the Trans-Siberian Railroad, in the Soviet Union, which stretches over 5,864 miles from Moscow to the Pacific Ocean, and takes more than eight days to travel!