LET THE EUROPEANS TREMBLE. When will they have intermodal trains over there like the United States has?

It won't go down as the longest train in the world, or even the U.S., but at 3.5 miles in length, Union Pacific's IDILBF-08 was just one heckuva train. It left the Dallas intermodal ramp at 10:08 a.m. Friday, Jan. 8, and made it in one piece and without major problems to Long Beach, Calif., at 4:45 p.m. two days later.

UP spokesman Tom Lange says the 18,061-foot, 15,498-ton train was assembled to test acceleration, braking, and the continuity of distributed power radio control, in addition to rail and wheel wear. Some of the 618 containers contained export goods, and the remainder were empties.

Nine General Electric ES44ACs powered this monster, three on the point and three more two-locomotive sets of power after each 100 or so container platforms, in distributed power mode. As far as acceleration and braking go, IDILB should have proven a star performer. Two and a half horsepower per trailing ton is more than enough to reach track speed of 70 mph across the desert. Brakes could be set or released simultaneously from four points on the train.

California interests worry about possible consequences.

The state Public Utilities Commission raced a team of personnel to Imperial County on Saturday to monitor the train as it wound its way toward the Inland Empire. The train originally left Texas on Friday night and reached its ultimate destination, a large intermodal facility near the Port of Long Beach, on Sunday.

Apparently, U.S. manufacturing isn't finished yet.

The train, which carried furniture, clothing, electronics and other goods for export from Texas, was the longest ever assembled by Union Pacific, Lange said. Among other benefits, he said, such trains could remove hundreds of trucks from the road and save fuel compared to other modes of cargo transportation. Trains up to 12,500 feet—a little over two miles long—already are operated in the Los Angeles area, he said.

A distributed power configuration means one engineer, in the lead unit, controls all the trailing units, no matter where they are placed in the train. That's going to bother the Brotherhoods.

“Nobody I know of in the railroad industry ever has run a train this size,” said Tim Smith, state legislative chairman for the union.

“We’re not trained for it. The longer the train, the more you have to consider the curvature of tracks...starting and stopping.”

The job is probably easier with distributed power, where the engineer can put some units in power mode and others in dynamic brake mode, and keep it running, than it was in the days of cab-forwards communicating by whistle signals. There were more dues-paying Brotherhood members on those cab-forwards. There's something compelling about three-plus miles of stacks rolling at 70 mph.

As far as the longest freight trains, that record is still Australian.

The title of longest U.S. freight goes to the 500-car train of loaded coal run by Norfolk & Western (now Norfolk Southern) on Nov. 15, 1967, between Iaeger, W.Va., and Portsmouth, Ohio. It measured almost 21,425 feet and weighed 48,584 tons.

Guinness World Records says BHP Iron Ore ran the world's longest train. On June 21, 2001, a 24,119-foot train carried 82,262 tons of iron ore from Newman to Port Headland, 171 miles, in Western Australia.

The Pennsylvania Railroad and Norfolk and Western both experimented with long coal trains in the mid-1960s, and both carriers thought better of it. I'm not surprised that Union Pacific, the developer of the 4-12-2 and the simple articulateds and the turbines and the double diesels, would want to exploit the capabilities of distributed power in this way.