A friend at work (A fuels engineer) saw a similar statistic a couple of years ago and poo poo'd it as well initially. He then did some fag packet computations and reckoned it probably wasn't that far out in certain circumstances. Apparently you don't get anything like the drag that you do with a wheel on a rail compared to a tyre on the road and economies of scale when you start to run really long trains come to the fore.
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