Thursday, April 17, 2014

How fast are Japan's bullet trains?

When transportation between Osaka and Tokyo was via conventional service trains, it took almost 7 hours to travel between the two cities.  Today, with Japan's bullet trains, the same journey takes less than 3 hours.

We rode the bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo and while waiting for our train, I tried snapping photos  but I couldn't catch the end of the train every time. Haha...


This is the best shot I ever got. 


According to our tour guide, the trains in Japan are super efficient that's why her strict instruction to us was to follow Japanese time on the day we were to board the train.  Haha... Each route is timed by the second and if a train gets delayed by even just a minute, the delay is declared.  Wow!

Japan's bullet trains travel about 300km/hour (the first batch of bullet trains travelled at 220km/hour).  But when you're inside the train, you don't realize the hyper speed because the ride is super smooth.  In fact I was asleep most of the time during the trip. Haha... You'll only realize that it's super fast when you look out the window and see you're rapidly passing by houses and fields.

I checked out the safety record of Japan's bullet trains and in the 45+ years since the bullet train's inaugural run, not one of the 7 billion riders has been injured or killed. Wow...  The only not-so-good record was in 2004 where an earthquake caused the derailment of 8 cars. But in terms of accidents caused by human error, zero. Amazing!

By 2025, guess what is in the pipeline for Japanese bullet trains?  Shortening the Osaka-Tokyo trip from less than 3 hours to 1 hour with a train prototype that holds a world speed record of 581 km/hr.  Whoa...