Well, trains will probably only get a few scratches from a collision with a car, maybe the coupler and the lights will break but that's about it. It's a whole other thing to crash it into a concrete wall at 100 mph.
To be fair, we've all seen various photos of train wrecks where the train won and the building/wall/earth lost. And while the above photos are awesome and perfectly demonstrate the finite structural integrity of the iron horse, none are as famous as this: ...in which little physical damage to the locomotive is apparent. Then you have this: ...in which the greatest damage to the locomotive occurred when it was cut into three pieces for removal. Then this: You get the point. Trains aren't invincible, sure, but they can put up with almost as much as we give them credit for.
haha yes, it would get to 36m/s in an hour. Meaning an acceleration of .01m/s^2. For reference gravity is 9.8m/s^2 But at the end of the hour it would be going about 130 km/h........
don't get me wrong, I agree they can take a beating, and they are quite a bit stronger than most vehicles. it just annoys the crap out of me when a train hits a 80,000lb rig, complety demolishing it and the locomotive drives away totally unscratched. yes with small cars, pickups, suvs, vans, etc.... theres not going to be a lot of damage to a locomotive, but when trains hit larger vehicles the damage to both can be quite high. also as shown in your pics, brick/concrete walls have little effect on a train. of course cars have also been known to drive through the occasional (single layer) brick wall and still be drivable afterwards. (imported from here) meh, same difference.
I like the idea but it looks hard and seems hard to incorporate into BeamNG(notice change of name (was gloeing))
The lag though. It would have to be low jbeam or load in close to the vehicle, otherwise that's a CPU suck. --- Post updated --- Rigs of Rods. The predecessor of BeamNG