What do freight trains carry?

Almost anything you can buy. Trains car enormous bulk materials from finished products off a container ship, to raw materials such as ore or coal for powering and creating things.

Trains can serve things in a few ways.

Directly:

The cargo is directly off loaded and loaded onto a freight car. Examples of this would be grain elevators. Silos store grain until it's ready to be shipped. Hopper cars are aligned and filled via gravity from the top, and empty via vacuum/gravity out of bottom openings.

Indirectly:

A cargo is started at another site, and brought to the train for further shipment.

A good example of modern day shipping by train indirectly would have to be intermodal ports involving giant container ships. The containers are offloaded via cranes, and boarded on trucks. They are stored in the port until they are boarded on trains to be shipped to factories, or other (train to semi-truck) intermodal ports. A good example of off loading like this would be if a car (i.e. boxcar) is left on a part of track embedded in the ground so that a truck or crew can unload the cargo to be further shipped by smaller means.

They can carry (in basic terms) these:

- Refrigeration Goods (Peaches, Fruit, Vegetables, Ice...etc)

- Liquids (Milk, Gasoline, Chemicals... etc)

- Grains (Wheat, Flour, Corn... etc)

- Parts (Auto-parts, Jet engines... etc)

- Metals (Scrap, Pipes, Train wheels... etc)

- Minerals/Rocks (Iron ore, Coal...etc)

- *Passengers (Peoples!)

- Stuff (Stuff you need. Water, food, supplies.)

...basically, trains can carry whatever you can buy.

Special Freights cargos:

- Trains (Locomotives can be "dragged" by a working locomotive. This is used to take a bunch of the same locomotive to get scrapped... etc)

- **Radioactive Materials (Nuclear Waste, Uranium)

- Stuff that looks unusual to see on a train. (Like a plane wing, or perhaps a part of a wind turbine.)

Hope that helps. If you google "Freight Trains" or "Freight train cargo", you can find an abundance of information.

*Passengers are considered a separate cargo due to the entirely different approach to how they are handled, yet in a (cold) way, can be considered freight.

**Nuclear substances are incredibly rare to be found transported. Nuclear waste is always kept in a special containment car. Uranium is hardly found on trains. If they are, it is usually federally protected and transported in a very special handling car and environment.