Trains...

Ill throw this all out. When the typical person thinks of a train, they generally think of Thomas the tank engine or some 1800s tiny 4-4-0 steam loco. Or at best, some old slow broken down piece of yesterday yet just 60 years ago, they where known for their speed, reliability, and dependability. Some may of thought of some small tank engine but when they saw some Goliath of the rails, they realized otherwise.

Today, the trains are bigger, the locomotives are more powerful, yet are still seen as trains of yesterday. Not the economic back bone that not even the truck can compete with. Think of all the coal coming out of the Powder River Basin on trucks.

Then, you show a steam engine and it becomes steampunk. It does fit as thats how it was. Steam powered was and is one of the most efficient forms to produce power. Just, no need to get over-exaggerated with what was. Steam and the Victorian era go hand and hand so having this view is better than imagining some small tank engine. Just...dont make a diesel steampunk! It goes even more hand and hand when one visions Phoebe Snow of the Lackawanna railroad lore. All dressed in white, on the route of the Anthracite.

So thats that, trains are trains. Just as powerful and awesome as some super car pushing 150 or a fighter jet taking off. And just to jerk you head a little, just at the 5MPH coupling speed is enough force for you to drive head on into a brick wall at 50MPH. The driving rod on the side of a super power steam locomotive weighs 4 tons, or the weight of a large SUV. And at 60MPH, it is spinning 4 times a second. A steam locomotive can reach a top speed indefinitely, it is the size of the boiler that maxes its speed out. Where as freight diesels are geared for a top speed of 80MPH.

And last, in the glory days of the railroad, steam locomotives did not have speedometers. If a passenger train was behind schedule, the engineer would push pass the scheduled speed to make up for lost time. Today, in the land of lawyers and a sue happy civilization, unless there is padding in a passenger schedule (there is), there is no chance for a train to make up time nor can a engineer even think about pushing past the speed limit.