Fastest Train in World Hits 500Km/h-Japanese Very, Very Happy
The world’s fastest train – a maglev vehicle operated by the Central Japan Railway Company capable of speeds in excess of 500km/h (~311mph) – is currently undergoing eight days of public testing. Short runs began Saturday, with 100 passengers making the 42.8 km trip from Uenehora to Fuefuki in about five minutes.
Check out a short clip of the test run below. To me, the best thing about this footage is how calm things look aboard the experimental train (as they should, of course). The passengers are thrilled to be riding it (according to the BBC, around a quarter of a million people applied to participate in this week’s test runs, with about 1 in 100 odds of landing a ticket), but part of what makes it all so futuristic and fun and weird is the fact that zipping along in a magnet-levitated tube of metal at over 300 miles per hour can still appear, from inside that floating metal tube, kind of humdrum:
The maglev trains are even faster than Japan’s famous bullet trains, which currently travel at about 320km/h (200mph). They use magnetic levitation, hence the name, to “float” above the train tracks. This minimises the friction encountered by ordinary trains, and allows them to travel faster. Maglev trains are due to be up and running by 2027. The ones being tested in Yamanashi will eventually run from Tokyo to Nagoya, carrying passengers between the two cities in about 40 minutes. Currently the journey takes an hour longer than that by bullet train.
When these amazing high speed trains officially debut in 2027, they’ll already be passé. Progress!
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Professor Mike
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So I suppose a gentle cup of tea whilst travelling is now out of the question? 😉
As a professional commercial/industrial videographer working for one of the component manufacturers, I had opportunity to be involved in collecting some very close footage of one of France’s high speed TGV trains in the early 1990s. A confusion got us set up expecting the train on one set of rails, when it arrived at 200 MPH on the closer set it was too late to move. We were much too close! The air blast was phenomenal! Flat on the ground in the ditch between, it was all we could do to hang onto the grass to keep from being blown away! (much or our equipment was!)
But the vacuum created by its passing was even worse. It literally sucked us up and rolled us down the track way.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to be near one going 300 MPH+ !
Meanwhile in the technological and industrial powerhouse of the world USA, , the last trip I took on AMTRAK, from Hartford Ct. to Erie PA, about 500 miles, 7 1/2 by car, took only 8 hours 45 minutes longer than its scheduled 11 hours 21 minutes, for an average speed of…. about 25 MPH. The Acela Express, the fastest US passenger train, on a 35 mile stretch from Boston to New Haven occasionally reaches 150 MPH, but boasts a scheduled travel speed for the 130 miles or so of…. about 65 MPH. And the 235 miles or so from New York to Washington DC…. 135 MPH maximum, scheduled 3 hr, 25 minutes… about 70 MPH (Drive time 3 hrs 45 minutes!)
America should be ashamed of it’s passenger rail service. We are way behind the rest of the world and the fact that freight trains have priority just boggles the mind.
Not only do freights have priority… have you noticed how many places the rails have been pulled up? So many places that uses to have at least 2 sets of rail, one coming, one going, now have only 1, so the non priority train waits on a siding for the priority to pass. Inefficiency…
More alarming though is that all that rail has been scrapped, re=melted and made into who knows what all. There is a plant near here making T-posts, fence posts, out of that high carbon steel.
All that wouldn’t be so bad if we still made steel in the US… but we don’t. Very little new steel is made in the US at all, most is re-melted scrap, much of which we buy from overseas!
So… what if we had an emergency need? Not only would we not have the raw steel to make the materials needed, we have no rail to ship it on.
What a shame. We won WWII by out producing the enemy, we built ships, munitions, equipment and shipped it around the world faster than the enemy could destroy it….. China is the number one producer of new steel, Japan is second. Doesn’t that scare you?
Pardon my anonymous post.
Leave it to the Japanese to produce a fast and efficient way to travel long distances. Now, if mankind could only develop a technology to take us quickly to another Earth like planet before this one blows itself up.
Good point Rick!
Ooooohhhhhhh! That’s why their eyes look like that!
LOL LOL! Thanks for my much needed morning smile David! 🙂