Trains
Thanks for joining us!
This episode was written by Kara and voiced by Kara and T.
Episode art was drawn by Jean.
It was originally released in September 2024.
— We love these books about trains —
Click on each photo for a link to the book
— The enduring delight of Brio trains —
MTA Train from the New York Transit Museum Store
compatible with Brio tracks
— Celebrate a love for trains with this apparel —
Printed Logo T-shirt by Boden
Short Sleeve Tee-Trains Blue by Winter Water Factory.
They have many different items in this awesome pattern.
Our playlist has been updated with the son
Freight Train
by Elizbeth Mitchell
Play pretend train!
You could make tickets,
have people be the conductor, engineer, or passengers.
Create your own train car with chairs and pillows or a cardboard box
and make a map of your route!
What will you see on your journey??
– Remember these famous trains from pop culture? –
The Polar Express
Thomas The Tank Engine
The Hogwarts Express
— Train Episode Summary —
Trains are vehicles —
Trains are machines and vehicles – they move and take people from one place to another.
Can you name any other vehicles? How about… Wagons, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, mobility scooters, trains, trams, subways, funiculars, tuk tuks, ships, boats, ferries, hovercraft, airplanes, helicopters, and spacecraft!
I especially love trains because they get a bunch of people from one place to another, all together! It’s usually fun to go on a trip, and it’s even more fun when you travel along with your family and friends! On trains, you have a seat to sit in, where you can look out of the window and take in the view, but you’re also allowed to get up and move around, which is so much different than a car ride.
Trains have some unique features —
Trains ride on tracks, which are rails set in the ground and made of metal. They’re very strong, which is good because trains are very heavy.
The person who drives the train is called a railroad engineer.
The conductor is a different person on the train. It’s their job to take care of the passengers, the other people who work on the train, and the bags that come on and off of the train. They check the route and make sure that the train stays on schedule.
They arrive and depart from train stations. They’re places where the engineer and conductor know to stop to pick up people. Sometimes there’s a little building or a covering for people to wait. They’ll have signs to make sure that people get on the right train, go in the right direction, and maps of the routes.
And sometimes train stations are big, beautiful buildings! Check out the amazing waiting room at Grand Central Terminal in New York City, which has a four-sided gold clock, grand staircases, and a beautiful ceiling with a mural of constellations. Union Station in Kansas City is a gorgeous old building that has been updated with cool stuff like a science center for kids and a movie theater.
Trains are made up of many cars, which is a funny word to use, because it’s not like the cars we drive. They are separate, connected sections.
There are trains with sleeper cars, that you can take overnight, where seats turn into beds!
Steam locomotives —
Before the steam locomotive was invented, people got around land by riding horses or taking carriages pulled by horses.
The steam locomotive was a big deal because it meant that a train could use force to move itself. In a steam locomotive, a material like coal or wood is burned to heat water. When that water is so hot it becomes a gas – steam! And that steam starts a process to make the train’s wheels turn!
These steam locomotives were nicknamed “iron horses” (iron, you may know, is a type of metal).
The first steam locomotive was built in the United States in 1830, almost 200 years ago!
In the many years after, we built many train tracks across the United States. Laying those railway tracks took a lot of hard work by a lot of people. And they changed the way our country worked! People could then get more things they needed from different places. And because trains made it easier to travel further, more people started moving into new/western parts of the country.
Before airplanes and cars were invented, trains were the most important type of transportation in the US.
Trains are important around the world —
Over 100 years ago, a train was built in Russia called the Trans-Siberian Railway and it is still the longest railway line in the world! It connects a city in the west of Russia to a city waaaay on the other side of Russia in the east. It travels so far that it would take 6 days to ride the whole route.
In Europe, the Eurostar train line takes people underwater through a tunnel called the Channel Tunnel. Its nickname is “The Chunnel”. It can now take people from Paris, France to London, England in just 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Parts of the train —
So we know that trains run on tracks. They have many sections called cars.
Trains can bring people from one place to another – those are called passenger trains.
Or trains can carry something called cargo. Cargo is… stuff. Trains that carry cargo are called freight trains. Sometimes, when we read books about freight trains, they may talk about a “hopper car” or a “gondola car” – those cars carry stuff like metal, logs, grain, coal.
The last car in the freight train is called the caboose. The caboose was a car meant for the train workers on the train to ride in. They’re not used as much today, but they’re still fun to say!
At the front of many freight trains and passenger trains is the train engine. This is the part that makes the power to make the train go. That section is also called the locomotive. The word locomotive is a combination of two Latin words – in Latin, “loco” means “from a place” and “motivus” means “causing motion”. Loco + motive.
Trains are understood by how they’re powered and how they run —
Locomotives can get their power from fuel, like wood, coal, gas or from a source of electricity!
The trains we think of with a big smokestack in the front, those are steam locomotives. They have a steam engine, which uses the power of steam to operate the machines. Those were the first major trains in the United States, right? As technology changed over time, so did the train’s power. New ways were created.
Now, most trains are diesel locomotives, powered by diesel engines, or electric trains.
Electric trains can be powered by overhead lines, another rail on the tracks, or a battery.
There is a type of rail transport network called high speed rail that goes waaaay faster than normal trains. High speed rails can handle trains that move 125mph and above, that is so much faster than any car we’d drive in.
The first high-speed rail system started in Japan and the train that ran on it had a design with a front part that looked kind of like a cone, kinda like the shape of a bullet, so it got the nickname of a bullet train!
And, there’s a really cool kind of train called a maglev train. Mag lev is short for “magnetic levitation”. Using magnets, they “fly” a bit above the tracks! There are only a few short lines so far, in Japan and China.
No matter how a train is powered, it moves quickly and stays on its tracks. We need to make sure that we don’t cross the tracks when the train is coming. Have you seen the warnings when a train is coming – the dinging and the bars going down?
There are also subway trains that run underneath the streets above.