00:00Ever wonder why there's a huge chunk of metal at the end of a train track?
00:03That's a buffer stop, and it's built to halt a massive train, think 850 tons of steel, in its tracks.
00:09These bad boys come in three flavors.
00:11First up, the fixed buffer stop.
00:13It's like a concrete wall that can stop a slow-moving train around 5 to 6 kilometers per hour.
00:17No sweat.
00:18Then you've got the friction buffer stop,
00:20which uses friction to slow down trains cruising at up to 25 kilometers per hour in just a few meters.
00:25And the real MVP, the hydraulic buffer stop.
00:27This high-tech beast absorbs almost all the impact energy using gas and friction,
00:31making it the smoothest way to stop a train without a crash.
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