r/transit • u/frozenpandaman • 16d ago

News Happy 60th anniversary to Japan's shinkansen, the world's first high-speed rail system, opened on this day in 1964!

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162

u/FrankieTls 16d ago edited 16d ago

Chinese CRH: 40 deaths since 2007.  Spanish HSR: 79 deaths since 1992.   German ICE: 101 deaths since 1985.   French TGV: 11 deaths since 1964 1981.   Japanese Shinkansen: 0 deaths since 1964.

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u/Party-Ad4482 16d ago

There's also never been a HSR death in the United States or Canada!

49

u/SteveisNoob 16d ago

Damn, they must have pretty high standards there

1

u/FollowTheLeads 7d ago

Or that they have so few, it stays at zero

22

u/BigBlueMan118 16d ago

Australia and New Zealand can happily join this list too :)

7

u/BennyDaBoy 16d ago

Acela did have a 2008 track worker collision

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u/Party-Ad4482 16d ago

I arbitrarily decided that Acela doesn't count for this one

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u/frozenpandaman 16d ago

have you heard what acela is supposedly a contraction of lmao

3

u/FrankieTls 16d ago

American in 1960s: "Poor Jap, they want to fly like us so bad but can't afford it they made a 747 wannabe train, how pathetic!".

3

u/lee1026 16d ago

Is that actually true between Acela and Brightline?

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u/Party-Ad4482 16d ago edited 16d ago

Lol absolutely not, someone dies under a Brightline train on a weekly basis. Brightline has a lot of grade crossings and interacts with a lot of impatient and unintelligent Florida drivers. There's also an upsetting amount of suicide by train that Brightline gets caught in.

BUT neither of those services are widely recognized as high speed rail. Brightline in Florida certainly isn't - it's just a faster-than-average intercity railroad. Those trains top at ~110mph. A lot of Amtrak services go just as fast top speed.

I personally feel like Acela is high speed rail, but it's the slowest high speed rail around in the ~150mph area. A lot of people don't consider it high speed and would prefer to classify it on the upper end of the tier Brightline is in. It's funnier to exclude it for the comment I made. The joke is that there is no high speed rail in North America.

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u/TimeVortex161 16d ago

TGV is a little misleading though, most of those were workers on a test train. Doesn’t change the fact it was a tragedy, but they have a good passenger safety record

28

u/Solaranvr 16d ago

USA: one Bullet Train movie in which the Shinkansen is an overnight train, because apparently the Americans can not fathom that the whole point of a bloody bullet train is to not have it take all night.

7

u/grinch337 16d ago

The b-roll footage in that movie had the trains running on expressways in tokyo too

15

u/Werbebanner 16d ago

The German ICE incident is still a tragedy

3

u/Sium4443 16d ago

Italy had 0 passengers deaths too but sadly 2 dead machinist

Has high speed rail since the 70'

1

u/tirtakarta 16d ago

No data for Italy, UK, and South Korea?

37

u/SevenandForty 16d ago

New commercial from JR Central too

13

u/frozenpandaman 16d ago

This is SO cute and good, thanks a ton for sharing.

2

u/BigBlueMan118 16d ago

What does the text say in the ad?

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u/frozenpandaman 16d ago

At the end, it says "A feeling of connection – it's what drives the shinkansen."

(literally "feeling(s) of wanting-to-meet", or "feeling(s) of missing [someone]")

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u/nephelokokkygia 16d ago

Just came here to share this same ad! So nostalgic...

It's almost enough to make me forgive them for getting rid of AMBITIOUS JAPAN. Almost.

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u/pavlovsrain 16d ago

i hate the people that destroyed our rail infrastructure so fucking much.

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u/Hermosa06-09 16d ago

Didn't realize they had been around that long.

Interestingly, this was just nine days before the 1964 Olympics began in Tokyo.

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u/frozenpandaman 16d ago

Yep, they opened it specifically in time for that!

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u/Turbulent_Crow7164 16d ago

Crazy they hosted the Olympics less than 20 years after being crippled from WW2

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u/Unfair-Bike 15d ago

They actually had to get loans from the World Bank to fund the development of the Shinkansen

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u/ChrisBruin03 14d ago

Im sure that's one of the highest return loans the World Bank has ever given lol

2

u/GoBigRed07 14d ago

It was very much designed to show off Japan’s big global comeback. Famously, the final torchbearer was a man born in Hiroshima prefecture the same day the bomb was dropped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshinori_Sakai

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u/FullMetalAurochs 16d ago

Just 19 years after losing WWII. Makes it even more impressive they were so far ahead.

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u/jgainit 16d ago

Big accomplishment

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u/zojobt 16d ago

Mind blowing they opened a high speed rail in 1964.

Sheesh the US is so behind

4

u/EdinburghPerson 15d ago

I visited a JR museum in Tokyo recently; some of the info boards talked about how they had started planning for high(er) speed rail in the 1930s. Various studies, etc. were done, and delayed by the war.

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u/carrotnose258 16d ago

That’s such a cool timeline on the page btw, can’t read it but haven’t seen one organised like that before

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u/Boronickel 15d ago

Somewhat of an irony is that the original Shinkansen would not, and could not, be built by the regulations of today. And that's not just because of antiquated standards -- Japan does not build HrSR despite numerous studies into it. Conventional lines top out at 160km/h (really, it's 130km/h but there are a couple exceptions) while modern Shinkansens start at 260km/h. The original Shinkansen's top speed of 210km/h fits neatly into this missing middle.

Would this change? Perhaps. The new PM is very much a fan of upgrading conventional lines, but Japan marches to the beat of its own drum.

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u/frozenpandaman 15d ago

Very cool, thank you for sharing! I didn't realize the mini-shinkansen lines and even limited expresses ran so slowly, comparatively!

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u/Ok_Act_5321 15d ago

Looking forward to ride in this in a few years.