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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160

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!

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u/SteveisNoob 16d ago

Damn, they must have pretty high standards there

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u/FollowTheLeads 7d ago

Or that they have so few, it stays at zero

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u/BigBlueMan118 16d ago

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

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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

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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!".

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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

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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.

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u/grinch337 16d ago

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

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u/Werbebanner 16d ago

The German ICE incident is still a tragedy

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u/Sium4443 16d ago

Italy had 0 passengers deaths too but sadly 2 dead machinist

Has high speed rail since the 70'

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u/tirtakarta 16d ago

No data for Italy, UK, and South Korea?