They moved 99,732 tonnes with a single driver

It weighed 99,732 tonnes and one man ran it from the front cab.

On 21 June 2001, in the north-west of Australia, the mining company BHP Iron Ore coupled up 682 cars loaded with iron ore at the Newman and Yandi mines and sent them rolling the 275 kilometres down to the Nelson Point wharf at Port Hedland. The train measured 7,353 metres. Seven kilometres and a bit: if the head of it were standing outside your front door, the tail would be an hour and a half away on foot. Guinness certified it as the longest and heaviest train that had ever run.

The longest part lasted twenty-five years and four months. On 18 October 2026, nine days ago, South Africa's Transnet took 696 wagons and some 7.6 kilometres of train along the ore line between Saldanha and the Northern Cape, and claimed the length record, as yet uncertified. But that train was running light. The weight record is still the one set on 21 June 2001, and nobody has come near it.

99,732 tonnes is about 2,500 articulated lorries of forty tonnes each, lorry included. Lined up nose to tail they would take up forty kilometres of motorway, bumper to bumper.

The region is called the Pilbara, and it is a place where the railway does not carry passengers: it carries rock. The tracks are private, built by the mining companies, and trains of some 268 cars and 2.9 kilometres run on them all day long. That is the ordinary size. What happened on 21 June was two and a half times that, and it was a trial.

What was being tested was control. Eight General Electric AC6000CW diesel-electric locomotives — among the most powerful ever built for heavy haul — were spread along the train in three pairs and two single units, instead of all riding up front together. The reason is brute force. If you pull the whole train from the head, the couplers on the first cars carry the weight of everything behind them, and couplers have a limit. Spread the engines along the train and each stretch pulls its own share, so the strain is divided. The problem is that you then have seven locomotives nobody is touching.

That is what distributed power is for — the brand the industry uses is Locotrol — and it is essentially a very stubborn radio: the driver moves the throttle in the lead cab and the other seven machines, kilometres away, repeat the order at the same instant. The trial on 21 June was there to check that this sharing held up in the worst case anyone could imagine, and it held for all 275 kilometres. And all eight machines were run by a single driver from the lead cab: industry accounts agree on that, although the Guinness entry does not give his name.

There is a silly question with a lovely answer: how do you weigh that. No weighbridge exists for a seven-kilometre train, so the gross weight is added up, car by car. Each car is weighed at the mine itself as it is loaded, and the figure for the train is the sum of those 682 weights plus the eight machines. Six hundred and ninety numbers written down one by one.

The record changed nothing. Pilbara trains are still 268 cars long, because a train like that takes up the whole line, fits in no passing loop, and blocks every level crossing along the route for minutes at a time. It was done once, and then they went back to the size that lets everyone else through.

The driver who ran all eight machines that morning with one hand on the throttle does not have his name on the Guinness entry.