Train length or tonnage during what era?

In the 70p's I had quite a few 8,000-11,000 foot trains. Highest tonnages over Beaumont were beets and taconite at 10,000. One of the worst trips I ever made was with an 11,000 foot "hospital" train, of bad orders, and other "Purdy" bound cars. Most of these longer trains were not hotshots. Intermodal trains were longer due to the 86 foot (two trailer) equipment then predominant, but tended to weigh less, and have good power.

Anything on the mainline over 8,000 feet generally presented siding capacity issues and dispatching nightmares. These trains also generally had much lower HPT ratios than today, which has brought us things like distributed power, and this low HTP ratio, used up crew time, required patching dead crews, and tied lot of railroad capacity when crawling up almost any grade, blocking oncoming or following traffic.

It seems that train length has stopped growing over the last twenty year, but tonnage on some double stack trains are much more impressive.