Conversation

Dude’s a lineman. I don’t think I’d have either the quick thinking or courage to do what he did. You can see him hesitate for a second before committing. He apparently donated most of the reward he got to the kid for his education.
2
23
Damn. That’s a lot of momentum to arrest even for a 2 second window.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
And the loco pilot applied emergency brakes giving an additional 2 seconds. twitter.com/rajtoday/statu
1
13
Rough calculation for fun. Normal speed 100-105 km/h but slamming the emergency brakes brought it down to 85. Train weighs I’d guess 10,000 tons? If it shed that energy over 5 seconds, I calculate a brake power output of like 213 MW. Did I do that right?
4
7
Replying to
Nowhere near 10‘000 t. A fully loaded freigh train here in Switzerland would be 1‘600 t. So I‘d go with a conservative 1‘000 t, which would most likely still be too high.
1
1
Replying to
Yeah, I looked it up. About 1300 tons seems right. Google gave me a 3-20k t range so I picked the middle but that’s heavily skewed by really long, heavy freight trains
Replying to
Yeah I guess 20 t are American freight trains with double carriages (two stacked containers) and like four engines. You can‘t do that if you have tunnels.
1