In which I calculate the energy of a train made of lead going at Mach 3

Oh dear, it's been a while since I last posted. Been rather distracted with stuff since Spring Break (which seems like ages ago), and the year's over in just a week or so now. Ridiculous.

Anyways, as per the title, I was talking with a friend over spring break, and we were trying to find an apt analogy for the power of a god slapping you on the wrist. The best we came up with was a train made of lead going at Mach 3. The conductor of which was Deadpool...

Yep, this guy.

... and a passenger being Bane, riding a T-Rex.

Illustration and idea courtesy of Dan Luvisi

... Right, so. That was our analogy. And me being me, I decided to figure out just how much energy our lead train would pack.

To do so, I found the average dimensions of a boxcar online to be roughly 68 x 11 x 13 feet on the exterior with 0.75 foot thick walls, as well as the height of a T-Rex to be approximately 4 meters tall. I then applied the dimension ratio to the height of the T-Rex (I assumed that it'd be "sitting" most of the time) to get interior dimensions of 23 x 3.3 x 4 meters. The walls were rounded to be about 0.25 meters, giving exterior dimensions of 23.5 x 3.8 x 4.5 meters.

Subtracting the volume of the interior from the exterior, I got 98.25 cubic meters of lead per boxcar, which was rounded to 100 cubic meters to account for additional stuff on the interior (Though the seat cushions wouldn't be made of lead, that'd be uncomfortable). I decided that the train would have 25 boxcars, which gave 2500 cubic meters of lead for the boxcars. This was brought up to 3000 cubic meters from the locomotive (Which I estimated to be about 300 cubic meters - locomotives don't have a lot of empty space) and the wheels, connections, etc. (Estimated to be about 200 cubic meters so the final number would be nice).

As lead has a density of 11,340 kg/cubic meter, the total mass of the train came out to be 34,020,000 kg. Yeah, 34 million kilograms. A quick Google search gave me Mach 3 as 1020.87 m/s, and when everything was plugged into the formula for kinetic energy (Ek=1/2mv^2), the final energy came out to 1.77x10^13 J (With the T-Rex, 1.773x10^13 J), or 17.7 terajoules of energy.

Which is a large number, obviously, but it's a bit hard to imagine. So I pulled up Wikipedia's handy TNT equivalence page, and learned that our train would have kinetic energy equivalent to approximately 4.25 kilotons of TNT, a medium nuclear weapon (According to the page, "The nuclear weapons currently in the arsenal of the United States range in yield from 0.3 kt (1.3 TJ) to 1.2 Mt (5.0 PJ) equivalent"), or - almost exactly - Minor Scale, the "largest planned conventional explosion in the history of the free world".

It doesn't look that large until you realize that the little white thing in front of the explosion is a goddamn F-4 Phantom fighter jet

So, yeah. That's what I did over spring break. I think it was worth it.