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TIL the average freight train is about 1 to 1¼ miles in length (90 to 120 rail cars). When it's moving at 55 miles an hour, it can take a mile or more to stop after the locomotive engineer fully applies the emergency brake.

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ANbvo TIL the busiest transit hub in the western hemisphere is located below Madison square garden. (In the 2020s it also expanded to the James Farley building.)
e01GL TIL France banned short haul domestic flights where train alternative exists for environmental reasons. A flight from Paris to the same destination can be more than 70 times dirtier in terms of carbon emission than trains while saving few minutes.
PYnOe TIL that natural gas, a cheap and available fossil fuel extensively mined in the USA, produces roughly 50% LESS climate changing carbon dioxide than coal, and that most coal-powered power plants can be converted to run on it.
ZQDY TIL of “Ubasute” a Japanese word which translates to “abandoning the old woman”. As the name implies, families would carry the elderly members of their family into the forest to be left to die of dehydration/starvation. It was done during periods of hardship to take the burden off of the family.
MelAa TIL Johannes Kepler wrote the world's first genuine science fiction in 1609. The novel advanced a Copernican model of the universe, described gravity decades before Newton, envisioned speech synthesis centuries before computers, and presaged space travel three hundred years before the Moon landing.