Shinkansen bullet train

On October 1, 1964, nine days before the Tokyo Olympics opened, Japanese National Railways launched the Tokaido Shinkansen, a 515-kilometer line between Tokyo and Osaka. Its blue-and-white electric trains ran at up to 210 kilometers per hour, then the fastest regular passenger service anywhere, and cut the Tokyo to Osaka trip from about six and a half hours to four, and to three hours ten minutes in 1965. The trains ran on dedicated standard-gauge tracks with no level crossings, unlike the narrower gauge of Japan's older rail network.¹

The Tokaido corridor joins Japan's biggest cities, and by the 1950s the old narrow-gauge line was full. JNR president Shinji Sogo and chief engineer Hideo Shima, with the help of engineers who had worked in aircraft design in wartime, proposed a new line with electric trains with power spread through the cars, not a locomotive, so axle loads were lighter and acceleration was quick. The World Bank loaned US$80 million. The idea built on the railway era that began in Britain in 1830, and on alternating-current electric traction. The project ran far over budget, and both men resigned in 1963, a year before the opening.²

The line was a success: it carried 100 million passengers in about three years and 1 billion by 1976, and it recorded no passenger fatalities from collisions or derailments in its first six decades. Its reliability and punctuality, measured in seconds, became a point of national pride. It was the model for France's TGV (1981), Germany's ICE and Spain's AVE, and, from 2008, for China, which built the largest network in the world at more than 40,000 kilometers. High-speed rail challenged air travel on routes of about 500 to 1,000 kilometers, and it is now central to arguments about low-carbon transport.¹