Here are a range fun and interesting facts about trains and the railway

• The earliest railway in Great Britain was built between October 1603 and October 1604. You can read about it in our Railway History.
   
• The steepest Cogwheel railway in the world is in Switzerland. It has a gradient of 48%.
   
• The longest straight stretch of railway is in Australia. The part without any curves is 478 kilometres (301 miles) long. That is as far as York to Dundee and would take more than five hours to drive.
   
• There is 15,795 route kilometres in Great Britain’s National Rail network, 14,353 of which are open to passenger trains.
   
• There are 40,000 bridges/tunnels and 9,000 level crossings on Great Britain’s National Rail network.
   
• The only railway to go to the top of a volcano was built on Mount Vesuvius in Italy, in 1880.
   
• The longest station platform in England is at Gloucester. At 602.6 metres long, it is about six times longer than a football pitch.
   
• The heaviest train in the world was a freight train in Australia in 2001. It was 7.3 kilometres (4.6 miles) long and weighed 95,000 tonnes. That is as heavy as 2.8 million ten-year-olds or more than 27,000 elephants!
   
• The fastest train in the world is the TGV in France. It is a similar train to the Eurostar which runs in the UK and across to France and Belgium. It can go at 515 kilometres (322 miles) an hour - four and a half times faster than a car on the motorway.
   
• In test runs, the French TGV reached speeds of 584km per hour and when it braked it took 10 miles to stop.
   
• The longest possible journey on one train can be taken between Moscow and Vladivostok in Russia, on the Trans-Siberian Express. The journey is 9,297 kilometres (5,857 miles) long - which is ten times longer than Land's End to John O'Groats.
   
• The highest railway station in the world is at Condor in Bolivia. It is an altitude of 4,787 metres which is three and a half times higher than Great Britain's tallest mountain.
   
• The largest station in the world is Grand Central in New York.  It has 44 platforms.
   
• The longest station seat in the world is at Scarborough station. It is 139 metres long.
   
• The longest railway tunnel in Great Britain is the Severn Tunnel. It is over 7 km (about 4 ½ miles) long and would take you over two hours to walk.
   
• In 2006/07 one billion and 164 million journeys were made and a total of 45.6 billion passenger kilometres were travelled in the United Kingdom.
   
• An average of 3.24 million passengers travel by train daily in Great Britain making it one of the busiest railways in Europe.
   
• Every time a Virgin Pendolino train brakes it returns enough energy to the power supply to brew 2.6 billion cups of tea, heat 587,607 irons, charge 4,722,980 mobile phones, power 100,733 showers, cool 297,297 refrigerators, light 1,810,029 low energy bulbs, boil 440,000,000 kettles, power 11,825 homes, or make 3.5 billion pieces of toast in a year!
   
• Around 70% of train journeys taken in Great Britain either start or finish in London.
   
• Around 43% of peak time trips into central London involve a rail journey. No other region in Great Britain uses rail as much as London and people in London use trains six times more than people in other cities.