After a minute and forty seconds, the action begins…
The technological beast (a silver serpent) rips through reality. The air all around it is greatly disturbed. Something black shoots up. The train is already gone. The Chinese are racing toward the future. Nothing can stop them.
A CRH380A high-speed train is seen at the Bengbu South Station of Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, Bengbu, East China’s Anhui Province, Dec 3, 2010. China’s high-speed train CRH380A broke the world record for unmodified commercial use on Friday during trial service with a speed of 486.1 kms per hour
Why can’t we have this instead of Light Rail?
As a nerd aside, am I the only one who immediately thought, “so THATS what super speed looks like!” ?
That’s nice. But I think I’d still rather get on an airplane.
I wonder if trains will ever break the sound barrier.
@1, absolute state power is why. Careful what you wish for.
Here’s cool video of China’s Chang-e 2 probe going into lunar orbit back in October:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vipgo5CZ…
@3 Why? One nice thing about trains is that you don’t have to travel way out of the city to an airport just to begin your journey. With a train you can hop on downtown in one city and hop off downtown in another. Of course high speed trains aren’t always the answer, but for mid-range distances they’re perfect.
@1 That high speed would be useless at the regional level. I rode the previous fastest maglev train in Shanghai, and as soon as they stopped accelerating they had to start slowing down since it only went from the airport to the city. That’s just a waste of money for those distances.
Where high speed rail would make sense here would be Portland to Vancouver, stopping in Seattle. But our mildly high speed rail will be good enough (the time it takes from downtown Portland to downtown Seattle is faster than a plane, we just need more frequency to really compete). Though I wouldn’t complain if someone came up with the funding for a bullet train.
It’s amazing the train can reach that speed while having to cut through that thick smog. Christ that country is polluted.
@8, and the electricity to run it, some comes from willy-nilly damming, some from burning coal. This example gets me thinking that with coal having become such a juggernaut of an electricity source it might be time to accept its centrality, and focus on finding a way to sequester the carbon emissions. Trying to shame people away from it is failing quite epically.
486.1 kms an hour! what is that? like 80 mph?
@7, the thing holding high-speed rail back is right-of-way. Amtrak doesn’t own the track, BNSF does, and they don’t give a shit. There’s no place else to put a line. Though marginal speed improvements are nice.
And remember, we’re investing all our money in The Car Tunnel of the Future.
Though to be fair, China’s buying up cars as fast as they can and already have far worse car traffic than we do.
I’m jealous.
@7, when your starting point is Denver, there really aren’t any “mid-range” destinations.
Yeah, I know the distance thing, and other factors, I was kidding. Its like flying to Northern California. Hit cruising altitude and come right back down again.
@8, my first thought too. Every video I’ve seen from China appears to have this ever-present fog covering everything.
@11 – The only place to put a line is the only flat, reasonably straight right of way we have — the freeway system.
It’ll be decades before even taking a lane or two is remotely plausible, but it’s how it’ll have to happen if it ever does.
Amazing what you can do with slave labor.
@11
“The only thing holding back high-speed rail is…”
How would you know this?
Did you design high-speed rail in a past life?
There’s a gazillion things holding it back.
@8 The most stable and compact way to sequester carbon is to make… um… coal. Oh, wait. Our planet already did that and now we’re digging it up and unsequestering it.
It takes more energy to reverse the process than we gain from burning the stuff in the first place. Which brings to mind the old joke:
“Doctor, Doctor! It hurts when I do this.”
“Well, then don’t do that.”
@19 Damn. I did it again. Meant to reference @9, not @8.
Sorry.
@19, I get that, which is why, er, science is called for. Research, they used to call it. Things undreamed of, and the like.
Taking high speed rail from Tokyo to Osaka in just over a couple hours is the way to go. Downtown to downtown in a clean fast train with no need to show up 90 minutes before departure and take your shoes off in a metal detector.
The other fun thing is that they have snack carts that go down the aisle offering some good snacks and then the little gift set of each region’s special food. The funny part is that the train blazes through each region so fast that there is a new regional specialty coming down the aisle every time the cart goes by.
@11: The contrast between China’s advanced rail system and the abysmal state of its car traffic is stunning. My partner was in Xiamen on business and dug up this video as evidence. His hotel was just a few blocks away, and he had to cross this street more than once:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxYk52hXn…
The thing that concerns me about fast bullet trains in China vs Japan and EU is that the Chinese aren’t exactly known for their attention to personal safety. Not to say that the train is unsafe for the passengers, but that the usual steps to insure that the tracks aren’t accessible to people taking shortcuts would be done there.
Charles, I’m surprised that you of all people didn’t take the opportunity to say something about this being time savings for the rich at the cost of poor families being splattered like bugs on the trains windshield.
Why is America such a Third-World Nation?
End the Foreign Wars of Republican Adventure and invest in America NOT overseas!
@22, I think the TSA would get their hooks into high-speed rail as well. A derailment at > 200 mph would be A VERY VERY BAD THING, and while it would take a bigger bomb to wreck a train from inside than a plane, they would probably still want to screen for it.
I’ve ridden the Japanese shinkansen a couple of times, and it’s great, but my ardor for US high-speed rail has cooled somewhat in the last decade. We have pissed off too many people. You can’t fly a train into a building, but you could kill everyone on board the train by doing some not-very-severe damage to any point on the track, and plenty of crazy/angry people would like to try it. This doesn’t even require explosives. A cutting torch or even a couple of man-hours with a hack-saw could do it.
If you had high-speed rail all up and down both coasts, how would you each of those thousands of miles of track from sabotage? A bazillion video cameras would prevent my low-tech torch or saw guys from working ahead of the event, maybe, at the cost of 24/7/365 monitoring! (OK, maybe something could be built into the rails to automatically detect tampering, but is this done in, say, France?) Lobbing a bomb onto the track or parking a car-bomb under a bridge just before the train arrives, not so easy to stop. I don’t like it…
Oops, edit: “…how would you *protect* each of those thousands of miles…”
But you probably figured that out by now.
I agree with @24. As some one who has spent considerable time riding the rails in China, the thought of getting on this thing scares the beejeesus out of me…
@26 they actually do board and use the current Amtrak too. They had sniffer dogs on it during Thanksgiving weekend travel.
@29, yes, they run dogs down the aisle on every cross-border train. Which doesn’t address @26’s points even a little tiny bit.
@26, the thing is, that’s true of an almost unlimited number of things, very few of which are protected at all. Crashing a train wouldn’t take out very many people, considering; the attacks on 9/11 were spectacular not because of the people in the planes but because of the people in the buildings they struck. But think about this: what if terrorists took out a bridge? Or a chemical plant? Or a nuke plant? Or a dam? Even an electrical substation, though it wouldn’t kill many, would wreak havoc on a city.
And fear and havoc are the goal — that’s why we call them “terrorists” not “killers”. The real victims of 9/11 were you and me, and we’re still paying now. Look how much trouble you can cause with a few grains of anthrax — or even fake anthrax. Look at how much blood and treasure has been spilled over bogus fears of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, when in fact most of the ones we fear the most (chemical, bio) are really “Weapons of Mass Wastes of Time”.
Not building high speed rail because you fear terrorism is ridiculous. With that line of thinking, you might as well just disband civilization altogether.
One more legal hurdle cleared, probably dozens more to go:
http://sfist.com/2010/12/03/ca_central_v…
@30 Most of those are poor comparisons. Power plants, chemical plants, small sites with only a mile or three of perimeter, many employees present at all times. Highway bridges, you get a few vehicles on the bridge, maybe the first few to drive up, not a significant fraction of road users. Dams are big and hard to breach. Existing rail, lower speeds and the bulk of use is freight, so it’s hard to hit a passenger train.
A high-speed derailment of one train could affect a largish (>1%) of all the day’s users of a fairly mature network. It would also knock out the line for some time. There’s not going to be any redundancy in this system. At the least, it would be worth considering how much it’s worth to try to protect the system. I don’t think this is an issue that could be ignored in seriously planning to build it.
I’ve ridden this train model (yes, in China), but we only hit 326 km/h. Pretty nice stuff, turned a 3 hour drive into a 45 minute train ride. And, yes, there’s always a blanket of smog over, as best as I can tell, most of China. I’ve only seen blue skies once (as in one day…I’ve spent a grand total of at least 6, non-contiguous, months in China), and that was WAAAAAAY out in the middle of nowhere.