Jane: This is But Why: a Podcast for Curious Kids! I'm the host
of the show, Jane Lindholm. My job is to help answer some of
the really terrific questions you send us from around the
world. Most of the time Melody Bodette and I do our research
and reporting from our home state of Vermont, in the
northeastern part of the United States. But whenever one of us
travels somewhere else, we like to take you with us. I had to go
to Washington, DC for work, and so I brought my microphone and
recording equipment with me, because Melody had found the
perfect person to help answer some questions you've been
sending us about trains. Maybe you take underground trains
known as subways, or metros, or the El, depending on what city
you live in, all the time. Or perhaps you've slept on a train
on an overnight trip to somewhere far away. Or maybe,
like I did when I was a kid, you have a spot where you like to
watch the trains full of all kinds of cargo rumble by, and
you count the cars one by one until you lose track. There are
lots of kinds of trains all around the world, but as I said,
today, we are taking your questions to the headquarters of
the US's main long distance passenger rail service called
Amtrak.
Patrick: My name is Patrick Kidd, and I'm a communications
lead at Amtrak, and also the in-house historian.
Jane: In-house historian? So you know everything about trains?
Patrick: Well, I'm trying to learn everything. I think it
would take a whole lifetime to do that.
Jane: Can you describe where we are right now?
Patrick: We're actually sitting on Acela Express, which is
Amtrak premium service. This is our fastest train that operates
between Washington and Boston through New York, and at its top
speed, it goes 150 miles per hour.
Jane: So how long would it take to go from Washington to New
York?
Patrick: From Washington to New York, I believe it's about three
hours.
Jane: And if I were driving, how long would it take me in the
car?
Patrick: Well, you never know. It depends what traffic is like,
right? If it's really bad traffic, sometimes, you know.
It's funny, sometimes my mom and I will go up to New York to
visit my cousin. I'll take the train, and she takes the bus.
I'll get there two hours before she does. You never know.
Jane: Why does she take the bus when her son works for Amtrak?
Patrick: Well, it's a good question. I didn't know that
too. Actually, the bus leaves close from her house, so she
often hops on the bus instead of coming into town.
Jane: All right, so our first questions are pretty basic.
Hannah: My name is Hannah, and I'm three years old. I live in
Virginia, and my question is, how do trains work?
Killian: I'm Killian. I'm five years old. I'm from Portland,
Oregon. How do trains work?
Max: I am Max. I'm five years old, and I live in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, and my question is, how the trains work?
Jane: How do trains work?
Patrick: Well, that is a good question. So I think if you look
at, if you ever seen a train, or if you look at pictures of
trains, you'll see that there's usually a locomotive on the
train, and then it has all these cars behind it, right? So you
have two kinds of locomotives. The locomotives are what's
pulling all those cars, making that train move. You have a
diesel locomotive, and you have an electric locomotive. And in
different parts of the country, they use different types. So the
diesel locomotive uses diesel fuel, which is kind of like the
gas you might put in your car. Think of it as like a cousin,
and electricity is like the electricity you use to power the
lights in your house.
Sam: I'm Sam. I'm four years old. I live in Chicago,
Illinois, and my question is, how do electric trains go?
Patrick: We have an electric locomotive. If you look at the
tracks, they'll have power lines up above them. We call them
catenary.
Jane: Catenary.
Patrick: Catenary, that's the name for the wires that are
above the tracks that carry the electric current. But they kind
of look like power lines if you see them from far away. And the
electric locomotives, they have this arm on the top of them
called a pantograph. And the pantograph is what draws
electricity from those wires down into the locomotive, and
that's what drives the engine and helps the train go forward.
So when you look at those different types of trains here
in the northeast, between Washington and Boston, most of
Amtrak's trains are electric. Outside of the Northeast, a lot
of them are diesel. So across the country, every day, we're
running about 300 trains a day that carry about 87,000 people
every day.
Jane: Now, if you look at old movies or cartoons, they
shoveling coal into the train. So is that how they used to
power the trains?
Patrick: That is how they used to power trains until about the
1940s, 1950s. That's when they started switching over to
diesel. Then, of course, they had electric two at that time,
by the 1930s.
Luke: My name is Luke. I live in Sandwich, Massachusetts. I'm
five years old, and I want to know how steam trains work.
Patrick: The steam train, today you don't really see too many
steam trains around. Maybe you go to a tourist railroad or you
see one in a museum, but if you ever seen one in operation, or
seen video, it's really amazing, really powerful. You saw that
steam and that smoke come out. Of course, it's called a steam
engine. It runs on steam, so you have to create steam. So those
old locomotives, they have what we call fireboxes, and so you
might, so it has a fire, right, either powered by coal or maybe
wood, and then all that heat is going to generate, of course,
heat that heats a boiler, and the boiler has water, and just
like you might have, like a pot of water on top of the stove is
going to generate steam, and all that steam builds up, and that's
what drives the machinery that turns the wheels for that
locomotive. So sometimes you'll see, if it's in operation,
you'll see all the steam coming out from the locomotive, as well
as the smoke from the burning of the coal or the wood.
Jane: All right, so that answers a lot of our questions about how
trains work. More specifically, there are a couple questions we
have about why and how they go on tracks. I mean, we all know
that cars don't have to go on a track, and they're powered
sometimes by diesel, sometimes by gas, sometimes by
electricity. Why do trains have to go on tracks, and how does
that work and help them.
Jason: Hi, my name is Jason. I live in Stanford, Connecticut,
and I'm three. My question is, why do trains drive on the
track?
Jessie: Hello. My name is Jessie. I'm five years old. Why
do trains have to go on tracks?
Patrick: Well, if you are ever able to go up into a locomotive
or maybe see pictures of it, now, there's no steering wheel
like you have in a car, so you can't steer a locomotive to go
in a certain direction. It's the tracks that are really guiding
that train. So the tracks themselves are made up of two
rails, and that's what the wheels are on, and then those
two rails are tied together by what we call ties. They usually
wood or sometimes concrete, and then that whole track sits in
the bed a crushed stone, which we call ballast, and that,
because of how wide it is, it helps distribute the weight of
the train. Because the train is really heavy. I mean, it's tons
and tons, right, the locomotive and the cars, but it also guides
the train. So if the tracks go straight, the train goes
straight at the tracks curve, the train curves. But it also
gives you the ability to make really long trains too, right?
Because they can just guide or be guided by those rails.
Jane: a train?
Patrick: Well, we have to remember almost 200 years ago,
when they first, you know, created trains, there were no
such thing as cars. They didn't exist yet for another 70-80
years, you really didn't have rubber wheels either. So you
have these really heavy machines, you have to figure out
how to get them to go over the ground, and the track is one
way, again, to distribute all that weight. And think too about
trains. If you've ever seen a freight train, a freight train
might carry like coal and gravel and even orange juice, you know,
sand, you can put, like, hundreds of cars together. So
it's a lot cheaper to move all those goods by all those cars.
And then you also have passenger trains too, like Amtrak that
carry people.
Jane: So is it actually more efficient to use trains than to
use trucks to carry the orange juice and sand you talk about?
Patrick: It is more fuel efficient, and it's usually an
easier cost too, because you're able to carry more at one time.
Sometimes you're waiting for the trains to be put together,
because you might carry cars from one area and they put other
goods behind it. You assemble one big train that takes it
anywhere across the country. You know, for passenger trains, we
have lots of specialized cars too. So we have cars like
coaches like we're in today right now we're sitting as comfy
chairs we can sit in. You have cafe cars that have
refrigerators and microwaves and that coach car you can also
work. There are tables so you can get on your computer, or you
can read a book. Sometimes I like to take a nap. They also
have cars that have bedrooms, so and those ones it's really neat.
It kind of goes from day from night to day, or day to night.
You can take the chairs and they fold down, and you put a
mattress on them. They become a bed.
Jane: People are trying to get on. And I think we're even
breaking the rules because we're in the quiet car. But before we
get off the train and walk to the end, I want to ask one other
question. This is actually from Samara, but Samara is noticing
something that I'm noticing right now, which is that these
seats don't have any seat belts.
Samara: I am four years old. I live in Arlington Heights,
Illinois. And my question is, why don't trains have any seat
belts?
Patrick: That is a good question. And actually, if you
look at trains around the world, most of them don't have seat
belts. That's because the train cars themselves are really heavy
and strong, so if they do hit something, let's say, hit a
tree. Maybe there's a storm, you're really protected within
that car. But I think Amtrak and other railroads around the world
and across the US are always interested in continuing to look
at risk reduction and what might be safer. So you never know.
Jane: I want to go back and double back on a question from
Noah, because you mentioned this, that trains are really
heavy, and that's puzzling some of our listeners, including
Noah.
Noah: I'm seven years old, and I live in Billerica,
Massachusetts. My question is, how can trains go so fast, even
though they're so heavy?
Patrick: Well, this will be a good question one day when
you're in high school, you had to take physics or in college,
but basically, right? You have the locomotive that provides a
force, the energy to move the train cars ahead. So sometimes
in really long trains or heavy trains, you might see more than
one locomotive. It might have three or four right to really
carry all these cars.
Jane: And you're just talking about the engine cars, right?
Patrick: The locomotives have the engines inside them, whether
Locomotives.
they're diesel or electric, but once you get that train moving,
you have the momentum of that movement. So you have that all
those cars moving at high speed. If you try to stop the train, it
won't just stop right away. It's not even like a car, right? If
you stop a car, it takes a little while for it to really
come to a complete stop. So whenever you are on a passenger
train, you start coming into station. You'll see the train
has to start slowing down way before it gets to the station to
make sure it can come to a complete stop. And that's one
thing to talk about, safety around railroad tracks. You
know, you should always because trains come at those high speeds
and they can't stop right away, you should always look for a
designated crossing. If you cross railroad tracks, remember
to look both ways, because trains can come in either
direction, and the electric ones can be pretty quiet too. You
might not hear them. And I think one good reminder is that if you
see tracks, think of trains. So always take a minute to look
around your surroundings and make sure you're being safe.
Jane: As I was talking to Patrick Kidd about trains, the
passengers were starting to come onto the train, and to be
honest, they were looking at us a little funny, like, who are
you two people doing an interview on this train, and
this is the quiet car where you're not supposed to talk. So
I hope you guys don't talk the whole way to New York and
Boston. So we decided to get off the train before the doors
closed and we'd be stuck all the way to New York. When we come
back, we'll talk about bullet trains that go really fast, and
we'll discover a little bit of the history of train travel in
the United States.
This is But Why? And today, we're in Washington, DC, at a
big train station in the city called Union Station. At Union
Station, people are always coming and going, rushing to
catch the commuter rail or get on the subway. It's called the
Metro in Washington. Or to take a train all the way up or down
the east coast. The person we're talking to today, Patrick Kidd,
works for Amtrak. Amtrak was created by the US government in
1970 to make sure there was passenger rail service in the
country. Passenger rail service just means trains that are
designed for people, not for freight like car parts or orange
juice or sand. These are trains that carry people all over the
country. The federal government owns the majority of stock in
Amtrak, which basically means the government kind of owns a
lot of the company. But Amtrak is not really part of the
government. It's a private company. Patrick and I were
talking on a train that goes from Washington, DC up to New
York City and then on to Boston. Most of the time this train goes
about the speed of a car on a highway, but it doesn't have to
stop for red lights like cars do, and in certain places it
goes much faster. We stepped off the train to watch it depart,
and Patrick told me a little bit more about this train and other
trains. Okay, so now we're walking on the train platform,
right? Do I have that term, right?
Patrick: That's correct!
Jane: And we're outside the train. Can you tell me anything
interesting about this Acela, as you told me earlier from the
inside?
Patrick: So if you ever see the Acela, it's the most kind of
streamlined train, because it's our fastest train. Like I said
before, it can go up to 150 miles per hour at its highest
part of the route, or the fastest part of the route
between New Haven, Connecticut and Boston. So if you live up
that way in New England, maybe you'll see the train go by you
one day. They call these fixed consists. So unlike another
train, where you could add another car, you could take a
car off. These always operate as a set. So it has coaches and it
has a cafe car that always operate together, and it has
what we call power cars, which are like locomotives. There's a
power car at each end of the train, so that way, when it gets
to the last station, you don't have to turn the train around
and take time. You can simply reverse it and it can go right
back out and come the other direction. So it makes it a
little bit faster to turn the train around and keep it
running.
Jane: You mentioned that this is Amtrak's fastest train, but we
have a question from Riley about even faster trains.
Riley: I'm seven years old. I live in Melbourne, Australia.
And my question is, why do bullet trains go so fast?
Jane: Bullet trains are high speed trains that can whisk
passengers from one place to another at speeds of more than
200 miles an hour. Most people associate the phrase bullet
train with Japan, where they started operating more than 50
years ago. But these days, a lot of countries have high speed
trains. China has the fastest ones. The Shanghai Maglev Train
goes as fast as 268 miles per hour on one part of its daily
service. Some high speed trains in testing have reached nearly
400 miles an hour, but none go that fast, carrying passengers
on a daily basis. Patrick had some information about how these
trains typically go so fast.
Patrick: Those high speed trains, the bullet trains, what
really makes them fast is that, number one, they use electric
power, like the a Acela Express does. They're also really
streamlined. If you look at them, they're really smooth and
rounded, so they can go right through really quickly. They
don't have all the air hitting them. That's keeping them we're
making them go a little bit slower. You also see, when they
build high speed trains like that, they either will build a
whole new track just for the high speed train, or if it's an
older track, they'll try and smooth out any of the old
curves. They want to make it as straight as possible so that
train doesn't have to slow down and start back up again, and
then if there any road crossing, so try to close off the road
crossings. Again, just they want to keep that train moving as
fast as possible. You know, at all times we can get to this
destination.
Jane: Why don't you have bullet trains?
Patrick: Why don't we have bullet trains? Well, I think
we're working on it. You know, if we have a next generation of
a Acela Express that's coming in a couple years. They're actually
building the cars right now. That'll be our new flagship
line. But again, we're always looking to improve the service
that we provide to the American people.
Jane: Can you tell me the difference between a locomotive,
passenger car and a caboose? Because we haven't even talked
about the caboose yet, really, at least by name, and that's the
most fun one to say.
Patrick: So the locomotive is what really pulls the train,
right? It has the engines inside of it, whether that's diesel or
electric or steam, like we had talked about, the passenger cars
are actually all the different kinds of cars that hold people.
So whether that's a coach or a dining car or a sleeping car,
and then the caboose, the caboose. The Caboose is really
used on freight trains, but today we don't really use them.
They would have been at the back of the train, and that's where
the crews would have sat. You could do paperwork, you know,
have your meal there. But today, a lot of those functions are no
longer needed on day to day trains. They also, the caboose
would have had the marker lights for the end of the train to let
people the train behind it know that it was there. That's all
been automated today, so no longer. But if you look at a
caboose museum, you see one in a museum, you see probably had a
stove in a bathroom, usually had a bunk where somebody could
sleep, and maybe a desk that somebody could work at. It's
just a changing nature of the railroad industry today.
Jane: Well, you said you were a historian, a train historian and
an Amtrak historian. So tell us about the role that trains
played in in expanding America and our territory, especially
out west.
Patrick: Well, they played a really important role. We just
had a big anniversary about a month ago for the first
transcontinentalrailroad.
Jane: You have to explain trans-continental, sure.
Patrick: So the transcontinental, if we look at
trans and continental, that means going across the
continent. And maybe that's a little bit of a misnomer,
because it really went about across two-thirds of the
continent, but it finally gave you a route where you could go
from the east coast all the way to the west coast. And that was
a big improvement, because think if you had to take a ship from
the east coast and go all the way around South America. That's
before the Panama Canal was built.
Jane: That would take a year.
Patrick: Take a year, it would take months to get there right.
A train might only take you maybe a week, depending on how
fast it's going, how many stops you're making, etc. So it really
helped to link the country together. Of course, we don't
really have good roads at that time either. We really don't get
the highways we see today until the 1950s, 1960s the highway
system. So the trains were the main connection for getting
people to and from family and business and friends and kind of
adventure. I always say trains are more than just about
carrying people or carrying goods, but it's also carrying
ideas, right? It's taking new ideas and news out to other
places. Now you think about the depot back in those 100 years
ago, if you're the newspaper might come in on the train. So
that's where you're getting all the news about what's going on
in the bigger cities somewhere else. And that's really a center
of learning and kind of seeing what's going on in the world.
Jane: And with that, the train we were watching left the
station.
Patrick: The conductors, they're at the end doing one final
check, making sure everybody got on. He's just looking down the platform.
Jane: on its way north to New York and then on to Boston, and
that's where we'll get off today. There is much more to
learn about trains, and if you're interested, there may be
train museums near where you live. Thanks to Patrick Kidd and
Kimberly Wood from Amtrak for teaching us about trains at
Union Station in Washington, DC, and thanks to Mike Koenig for
the train horn sound. If you have a question that you want
But Why to answer, send it to us. You can have an adult record
you on a smartphone using one of the free recording apps that
come with the phone. Tell us your first name, where you live,
and how old you are, and then tell us what you're wondering
about. Send your questions to questions@ButWhyKids.org. But
Why is produced by Melody Bodette and me, Jane Lindholm at
Vermont Public Radio. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll
be back in two weeks with an all new episode. Until then, stay
curious.