Trains

Trains. They're big. They're heavy. They have cogs and gears. They make loud noises. They travel really really fast. Is it any wonder that I'm scared of them? I mean, an ordinary passenger train with 3 cars can weigh up to 8 tonnes and travel at 200km/h. At that speed it's packing 1.6GN of force, which is the same amount of force as a person falling from a 2041km high building, which is like falling off the moon. And since it's possible to die from a fall of 10m, a single train at top speed could kill roughly 204,000 people, lined up on the tracks. That's roughly the population of Bolitvia. Imagine the damage that the thousands of trains all around the world could do if everyone in the world decided to have a picnic on some train tracks or took the movie Inception too seriously. Now, a fall of 10m is likely to cause spinal damage, which, on the pain scale, is a 10. So using completely infallable logic and totally correct science and stuff, that is the same as pulling a bandaid off a wound 10 times. So one train has the Potential Pain Energy of 2 million bandaids. That's a lot of bandaids. 

Governments are not blind to this issue. If anything they go a little bit overboard in delivering public safety advertisements in this respect. These are some of my favorite posters

I haven't always been aware of the astronomical damage that trains can cause. Trains used to be adventurous, a great mechanical feat of mankind. Whenever my parents drove parallel to a train on the highway I'd urge them to try and beat it. Travelling faster than a train was an accomplishment worthy of infinite glory. 

Unfortunately the good times were about to come to an end.


My grandparents were in town, which was a reasonably rare occurrence and they, in their infinite wisdom, thought would be funny buy me a big picture-book called 'DISASTERS'. Inside were detailed accounts of man-made tragedies; the Hindenburg, Titanic, The Black Plague, The Tay Bridge Disaster. They were all accompanied by super-dramatic artistic interpretations of the events as they unfolded.

One picture stood out. It was a picture of a burning army supply train which had derailed and caught fire after its brakes failed when going down a hill. 300 German soldiers died horrifically, some burning to death, some dying on impact. Suddenly I was hit with the realisation that trains aren't safe, that they can break down, they can derail, they catch on fire, they can run over people and squish their innards out like a rolled up tube of toothpaste! From that moment on I've been scared of trains. 

Even Thomas wasn't safe from the deceptions of my paranoid 10 year old mind.

And that's why I'm afraid of them. Them and their mysterious "Gap". "Beware the Gap" they say. What's wrong with the gap? What's down there, between the train and the platform, that we need to be afraid of? Are there ghosts? Do evil monkeys wait down there, hoping to snatch an unsuspecting infant or chomp on some careless limb?  What do they do with all those empty chip packets? Do they still have my little matchbox beamer from '97? What will it take for them to give it back?

Regardless, Trains are frightening. You should all stay away from them.