Conrail had a experimental iron ore train leaving from Morrisville Yard, I believe in the early 80's. It had possibly 600+ taconite pellet iron ore "Jennys" bound for Zanesville US Steel, and it had like: 6 locos up front, 4 more mid train, and 4 more on the rear. It kept busting knuckles, and the train was broken up inside of 20 miles from its starting origin, and sent in several sections to it's destination in Ohio. "Conrail Fail" ! This was before DPU, and solid state electronics and "Chips" were yet to be developed, and computers were virtually non-existant. Even the big old VHS camcorders and VCR's were not yet available. 8 track, cassettes and LP records were high tech items back then. SD45's still employed small wooden wedges (resembling a rubber doorstop) jammed into the main contactors and electrical relays, to "Jury Rig" them, to get a locomotive to function. Ahhhhh...the good ol' days.
Not sure if this is a
World record: Australian BHP Iron ore train, the longest train to ever run in the world, this train is officially in the guinness book of world records for the longest train.
The record was set on june 21, 2001 in western australia between newman and port headland, a distance of 275km (170 miles) and the train consisted of 682 loaded iron ore wagons and 8 GE AC6000 locomotives giving a gross weight of almost 100,000 tonnes and moved 82,262 tonnes of ore, the train was 7.353 km (4.568 miles) long.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LsuNWjRaAo
As to do you think they will operate extremely long trains like this in the future ? This is what usually happens when there is catastrophic drawbar failure:
BTW: Longest HO (1:87.1) scale model train measuring 110.3 m ( 361 ft 10 in) made up of 3 locomotives, and 887 cars, was constructed by Miniature Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany, on November 27, 2005. If the model had been a full-scale train it would have measured 9.607 km (5.969 miles) long.