In Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our airports are choked with increased loads. We are at the mercy of fluctuating oil prices. We pump too many greenhouse gases into the air. What we need is a smart transportation system equal to the needs of the 21st century. A system that reduces travel times and increases mobility. A system that reduces destructive emissions and creates jobs. What we're talking about is a vision for high-speed rail.
Japan
At the entrance to Tokyo Central Station is a plaque which declares the Shinkansen “Product of the wisdom and effort of the Japanese people.” “As an indication of the unity of purpose and of the pride which the Japanese people feel for this achievement, this inscription …. Can hardly be bettered”, writes Rod Smith of Imperial College in his excellent history of the Shinkansen.
Japan’s first railways had been built, to a narrower gauge than ours, by a British engineer in the 1870s. The line from Tokyo to Nagoya and Osaka is the country’s principal 350 mile rail artery, accounting in the 1950s for a quarter of the country’s rail traffic although only three per cent of the rail system by length. It was electrified in 1956, enhancing capacity and reducing the journey time to six and a half hours.
This is where Japanese railway modernization might well have stopped for a generation – as it did, at electrification of principal inter-city lines, in most of Europe at the time. What happens generally seems pre-ordained after the event, and so it is both with Japan’s decision to develop the bullet train and our decision not to. Yet this is quite unhistorical, as Rod Smith explains. On the contrary, the phrase “railway downfall theory” was in vogue in 1950s Japan: the view that rail was an outdated technology which was set to follow horse carriages, canals and sailing ships, to be replaced by faster planes for the longest distances and by the far more flexible and individualistic car and truck for shorter distances.
This view was indeed widely held within Japanese National Railways itself. It was only the vision and leadership of a small group of talented managers and engineers, led by its president and chief engineer, which ordained otherwise. They essentially sidestepped projections about long-term rail decline, concentrating rather on the immediate capacity requirements of the densely populated and economically critical Tokyo to Osaka corridor, convincing the government that a patch-and-mend upgrade to the existing line was too cautious for this key route. This capacity argument, plus the availability of a low interest World Bank loan – jobs and regeneration being a good part of the case for high-speed rail, as for motorways, from the outset – led to the decision to construct a new passenger-only line for this route alone, to the standard international gauge, free from level crossings, with shallow curves and in-cab signalling allowing a consistently high line speed.
Japan
At the entrance to Tokyo Central Station is a plaque which declares the Shinkansen “Product of the wisdom and effort of the Japanese people.” “As an indication of the unity of purpose and of the pride which the Japanese people feel for this achievement, this inscription …. Can hardly be bettered”, writes Rod Smith of Imperial College in his excellent history of the Shinkansen.
Japan’s first railways had been built, to a narrower gauge than ours, by a British engineer in the 1870s. The line from Tokyo to Nagoya and Osaka is the country’s principal 350 mile rail artery, accounting in the 1950s for a quarter of the country’s rail traffic although only three per cent of the rail system by length. It was electrified in 1956, enhancing capacity and reducing the journey time to six and a half hours.
This is where Japanese railway modernization might well have stopped for a generation – as it did, at electrification of principal inter-city lines, in most of Europe at the time. What happens generally seems pre-ordained after the event, and so it is both with Japan’s decision to develop the bullet train and our decision not to. Yet this is quite unhistorical, as Rod Smith explains. On the contrary, the phrase “railway downfall theory” was in vogue in 1950s Japan: the view that rail was an outdated technology which was set to follow horse carriages, canals and sailing ships, to be replaced by faster planes for the longest distances and by the far more flexible and individualistic car and truck for shorter distances.
This view was indeed widely held within Japanese National Railways itself. It was only the vision and leadership of a small group of talented managers and engineers, led by its president and chief engineer, which ordained otherwise. They essentially sidestepped projections about long-term rail decline, concentrating rather on the immediate capacity requirements of the densely populated and economically critical Tokyo to Osaka corridor, convincing the government that a patch-and-mend upgrade to the existing line was too cautious for this key route. This capacity argument, plus the availability of a low interest World Bank loan – jobs and regeneration being a good part of the case for high-speed rail, as for motorways, from the outset – led to the decision to construct a new passenger-only line for this route alone, to the standard international gauge, free from level crossings, with shallow curves and in-cab signalling allowing a consistently high line speed.
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