Can a gallon of water pull a 1,000-car train around the Earth? Stan Meyer's Einstein line, checked

Stan Meyer often said that, according to Einstein, the energy in a gallon of water could take a 1,000-car train around the Earth many times (Denver, 1997). We checked the math. Burn the hydrogen in a gallon of water (424 g, about 51 MJ) and a 100,000-tonne freight train on level track rolls roughly 26 to 52 metres, depending on rolling resistance (0.001 to 0.002). Convert the whole gallon to energy with E = mc² (3.785 kg × c² ≈ 3.4 × 10^17 J, as much as about 2.8 billion gallons of gasoline) and the same train circles the Earth roughly 4,000 to 9,000 times. So the line holds, but only for mass-energy: about 6.7 billion times what burning releases. Stan's hydrogen fracturing process claimed to release more than ordinary burning by stopping the water molecule from re-forming; nothing that survives measures how much more. We can't find the train line in Einstein's own writings, but the equation is his. The tapes and transcripts are on stanslegacy.com.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer lecture · Denver, 1997
• Stan Meyer at his garage · 1990 interview
• Stan Meyer, lecture, Denver, 1997, at 30:18 — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, 1990 interview at his garage, at 16:38 (hydrogen fracturing) — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• E = mc²: 3.785 kg × (2.998 × 10^8 m/s)² ≈ 3.40 × 10^17 J; gasoline ≈ 116,000 Btu (1.22 × 10^8 J) per gallon, U.S. DOE Alternative Fuels Data Center
• Burning: 424 g of hydrogen × 120 MJ/kg (lower heating value) ≈ 51 MJ
• Train: 1,000 cars × 100 t, level track, rolling resistance 0.001–0.002, no air drag; Earth's circumference 40,075 km