Rail cars are way bigger than truck trailers, one rail car can hold three to four truckloads worth of freight. That means a single train could carry the same amount of freight as 300 trucks!

Today’s bullet trains can top 300 mph. The current world speed record is 361 mph. Japan is no longer alone in the high-speed rail department however: France, China and Germany all operate trains capable of similar extreme speeds, and plans are currently underway in the United States to construct a high-speed rail line connecting the California cities of San Francisco and Anaheim.

Trucker Fact: Over-the-road truck engines are designed to travel more than one million miles before being retired, whereas car engines are expected to go just 200,000 miles.

A fun fact is that the railroad industry uses drones. In order to run a safe railroad, tracks must be in good shape. Drones help get the job done. They do so by flying over rail yards and around bridges, allowing ground-penetrating radar and wayside sensors to identify possible track defects.

The average big rig carries 80,000 pounds of freight at one time. That’s 40 tons of goods and products.

On average, railroads are 3.5 times more fuel efficient than trucks on a ton-mile basis. Railroads can move one ton of freight more than 480 miles on a single gallon of fuel, generating a carbon footprint up to 75% less than trucks and making them the most fuel-efficient way to move freight over land.

Trucker Fact: The average small business trucker can travel as much as 115,000 to 125,000 miles annually. That works out to more than 240 nights away from home out of the 365 days of the year and can add up to over 3 million miles over a trucker’s career.

Trucker Fact: The trucking industry consumes roughly 50 billion gallons of gasoline every year, which is nearly 13% of the country's total fuel consumption.

Because rail cars can hold three to four truckloads of freight, just one train can take more than 300 trucks off the road. Think about what happens when you multiply that number by a year’s worth of shipments – that’s a lot of trucks!