How This Train Changed The World (1)

#Shinkansen #BulletTrain #Trains
The first 200 people to sign up at https://brilliant.org/mustard will receive a 20% discount on their annual premium membership. In 1964, Japan unveiled the Shinkansen—a new high-speed railway connecting the country’s two largest cities (in the 1960s), Tokyo and Osaka. Traveling at over 200 km/h (120 mph), the new, specially designed Shinkansen trains achieved the highest operating speeds in the world. But the Shinkansen project’s success was far from assured. Within the first five years of construction, the Shinkansen’s cost had ballooned, nearly doubling from the original estimate to nearly 400 billion yen. Critics dismissed the Shinkansen project as doomed to failure. Just a year before it opened, the director general of Japan’s National Railways Construction Department described it as the “height of madness.” In particular, he criticized the decision to use a wider gauge, which would make the Shinkansen incompatible with the rest of Japan's narrow-gauge network. Outside Japan, the project is viewed with both curiosity and skepticism. The 1960s were the era of the jet airliner and the automobile. Many Western countries were focusing on infrastructure projects to cope with the enormous growth of both modes of transportation. The United States in particular was investing billions of dollars in building new interstate highways, and the country's rail network was shrinking as a result. The railroads were considered too slow and impractical to compete with automobiles and airplanes. Many predicted the end of passenger trains by the end of the 20th century. But the opening of the Shinkansen changed the way the world viewed railroads. The Shinkansen demonstrated that trains could be the fastest mode of transportation for intercity travel (faster than automobiles and airplanes). The Shinkansen was the fastest way to travel from Tokyo to Osaka (515 km or 320 miles) when door-to-door travel time was taken into account. In its first three years alone, the Shinkansen carried over 100 million passengers. The Japanese inspired other countries to develop their own high-speed networks, such as the French TGV which began operating in the early 1980s. The enormous success of the first Shinkansen line spurred the construction of new Shinkansen lines to the west. Over the next half-century, the network would be expanded to reach almost every corner of Japan.

#Trains #BulletTrain #Shinkansen
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