Japanese Railway Company Starts Testing 249mph Bullet Train Speeds (arstechnica.com) 86
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, Japanese railway company JR East showed off its new Alfa-X, a high-speed bullet train that is designed to achieve a top speed of 400kph, or 249mph, which would make it the fastest commercial train in the world. In day-to-day operations, the train would shuttle passengers at 360kph, or roughly 224mph. On Friday, JR East will begin testing the Alfa-X, without passengers, on its railways. According to Bloomberg, the 10-car train will make the trip "between the cities of Aomori and Sendai at night" for the next three years during a testing phase. JR East hopes to use the Alfa-X commercially by 2030. Japan News says the line will eventually be extended to Sapporo. Bloomberg's report notes that there's a magnetically-levitated train in the works that may win the top-speed crown. It's been built between Tokyo and Nagoya and takes advantage of a tunnel-heavy route to achieve a top speed of 505kph (314mph). If all things go according to plan, it'll open in 2027.
Aomori to Sendai (Score:2)
I plan on making that trip in about a month. I doubt they'll be letting me on the train.
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This train is going to operate at 360 km/h, while the current bullet trains run at up to 320 km/h. I don't think you'd notice that big of a difference.
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Well, on the route Karlsruhe/Germany to Paris/France they cut the travel time from more or less exactly 3h down to more or less exactly 2:30h. Even the german trains, that used to be a bit slower than the french ones make it now in that time.
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I've been on that train. It was quite nice.
I have a green car JR rail pass for the trip to Japan, so we can have a nice quiet trip up to Aomori and back.
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Have you been on the shinkansen before? It's quite an experience.
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Sure have!
One of the best bits is a window seat and another shinkansen passes in the opposite direction - the sense of speed really jumps!!
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I like when it leaves the platform. If you aren't paying attention it's so smooth that you look up and suddenly realize that the train has already started moving!
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Have you been on the shinkansen before? It's quite an experience.
A couple of times, but not recently.
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Unless you were coming from Amtrack !
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I plan on making that trip in about a month.
It is 400km. You must be a very slow walker.
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You've got to enjoy the scenery.
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I plan on making that trip in about a month.
It is 400km. You must be a very slow walker.
It expect to be stopping at a bar along the way and there's a little padding in there for swimming across the Pacific to get to Tokyo Central Station.
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At least it's not shaped like a tentacle. Because Japan.
Significant digits (Score:2, Redundant)
We really need to do a better job of teaching about significant digits so that when someone has a nice round metric number, they learn to translate it into a round English number. Try 250mph instead of 249mph.
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You sir, have made the mistake of thinking Slashdot Editors give a shit about the quality of their work.
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We really need to do a better job
What's this "we" white man? YOU could've educated us on significant digits, but instead you just complain that somebody else didn't do it. Thanks for nothing.
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How are you certain that the train wasn't actually certified for a top speed of precisely 3.710e-07 planck-length/planck-time?
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The translation was done perfectly. 400km/h = 249mph. I think what you are trying to say is 4E+2 km/h = 25E+1 mph. But as it stands the number was given to a kph. You have no way of knowing if they rounded to 400km/h or if the train actually has that top speed and can't go to 401km/h.
I'm willing to bet the latter. This is almost certainly a speed limited train with software designed not to exceed 400km/h to the +/- 0.5km/h for rounding.
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That should be 6.7E5 furlongs per fortnite.
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The top speed will be the top design speed and will have been rounded to 400 kph in the design specification. Likely it can go a lot, lot faster.
The main thing holding the speed back at the moment is noise, especially when exiting tunnels.
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What it is capable of in purely mechanical terms and what the top speed will actually be are two very different things. You ever been on the Thalys? It's top speed when transporting people 300km/h. Not 301km/h, exactly 300km/h. You can watch it on the screen as you go. The fact that some designer rounded it down to that doesn't change the fact that passengers will experience 300km/h and not a km more thanks to systems when they are designed to a certain spec are electronically limited to that spec to ensure
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Hmmm modded down for pointing out trains have electronic speed limiters? Someone is wasting mod points.
Re: Significant digits (Score:1)
I've regularly used the Thalys about 20 years ago, and recently I took the TGV between Switzerland and Paris, checking the speed with GPS.
Interestingly, there were lots of sections at around 280 and 240 km/h, and the top speed was around 320.
The trains likely can do more (as they have in trial runs) , it's the tracks that are the limiting factor.
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They should also do more fact checking. This is NOT the fastest train in commercial operation. The Shanghai Maglev routinely travels at 430 khp (268 mph) and has a top speed over 500 kph.
This may be the fastest wheeled train, but that is not what TFA claims.
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Most people don't call a maglev a train. Because e.g. it does not have the engineering and construction problems a rail bound train has.
Everyone except you knows that we are talking about wheel trains, but thanks for nitpicking, someone needed to point it out, perhaps I had done it instead of you, but you beat me :P
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Most people don't call a maglev a train.
The Wikipedia page for "Maglev" describes it as a "train" in the first sentence.
A Google search for "maglev train" gets 474,000 hits.
A Google search for "maglev" alone, brings up a page of 12 links. All 12 have "train" in either the title or the first sentence.
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Does not change the fact that "most people don't call a maglev a train".
Try googeling for train ...
What is next? An airplane is a train, too?
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Here want to use a primitive measuring system based upon feets and toes, how about this CCXLIX miles per hour, it's appropriate ;D. You look so stupid taking decades to change to metric https://www.nist.gov/pml/weigh... [nist.gov], seriously you idiots have been trying and failing for decades, you should be embarrassed and not still trying to push imperial units, I suppose imperial units for a imperial government, huh (the rest of the world has to change back to suit you).
Why metric, 1 cubic metre of water = 1,000 lit
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It gets worse, we're going backwards. Puerto Rico switched to metric before it became a US Territory, and still is today. However, imperial has wormed its way in due to the close relationship with the mainland, and made things confusing. Speed limits and speedometers are MPH despite all distances shown as km. Cars are advertised as having certain MPG, while gas is sold by the liter. Beverage containers are more likely to be in ounces than ml (as in, 16 or 20 oz bottles instead of .5L/16.9 oz) sometimes
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Terrorist risk (Score:1)
Such trains seem too risky against terrorist attacks. Something that fast is going obliterate itself and everything around it if things go awry.
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Such trains seem too risky against terrorist attacks.
Shinkansen have been operating for decades. So far, terrorists have not been a problem. More Japanese die from bee stings than from terrorists. You should find something else to worry about.
There was the terrorist Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway [wikipedia.org]. But that did not affect the Shinkansen, and only killed 12 people.
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Yeah, well, Japan has some pretty terrifying giant hornets.
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Had one fly into my work place office there once. Staff were literally running and diving under desks.
I caught it and popped out the window, I later learned they kill a couple of people a year. Pretty much the same as sharks here Down Under.
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Japan has the advantage of being an island country that does not concern itself with political correctness. In the unlikely event that someone unscrupulous makes it into the country, someone of non-Asian descent wandering around train tracks in rural Japan might as well be carrying a giant neon sign saying "I'm Suspicious!". In urban/suburban areas the trains don't go any faster than standard trains.
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Japan is also going extinct in slow-motion.
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Terrorists can easily derail regular trains, or alter roads to kill people in cars, or just shoot crowds at concerts and airport security lines. If you want to make it impossible for the bogeyman to hurt you, you'll have to stay in your underground bunker all the time.
Re: Terrorist risk (Score:2)
Unveiled in ... (Score:2)
Nah. Too easy.
Need to speed up (Score:2)
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so..."high speed rail" is still slow. (Score:1)
The fastest experimental one is, um, HALF the speed of a generic airliner that has throttled-back to save on fuel.
The only way any train will ever truly compete with air travel (for people, trains are excellent for cargo at nearly any speed), is if the industry buys into Elon Musk's take on the long-dreamed-of levitated train in a low-pressure tube or goes to trains in tubes in actual vacuum conditions. In a tube, the possibility of collisions is avoided and safety-driven speed limits can be removed. In a l
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This is arguably one of the silliest things I've read today.
The fastest experimental one is, um, HALF the speed of a generic airliner that has throttled-back to save on fuel.
Yes? A driving is 1/10th of the speed of an airliner. That's why no one ever drives anywherre and cars can't compete with airliners.
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It's quite obvious you have never been to Japan. I live here and let me tell you that trains compete perfectly well with airplanes. One of the reasons is the easy of use: you just go to the station, buy the ticket, board the train, and go. For such short distances airplanes are faster if you don't count security checks and boarding time. Oh, and the trains are much more comfortable that any plane.
Itms2 PTC Wabtec (Score:2)
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Wabtec's system is a strictly North American thing. The rest of the world has their own train control systems. Initially it was country-by-country but most of the world (including India) is now standardizing on ETCS, Japan being an exception.
China has their own system that is bits of ETCS and Japan's stuff mixed together into a not-quite-compatible system for their own products. Some of their projects in Africa use this system as a form of vendor lock-in.
Rail vs Plane - Japan (Score:1)
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I always groan when I see "kph" - it's a horrible Americanism. There's no distance unit in it, for God's sake! It might make sense as a measure of acceleration if you read it as "knots per hour", but it makes no sense as a speed.
What about the price? (Score:3)
What about the price? I live in Aomori prefecture, and currently a ticket from Aomori to Sendai is 11,000 yen (about $100), and to Tokyo is 17,000 yen (about $150). Each way, so because I need to go back home, double the price. Going by car or by bus it's not much cheaper, and takes much longer. Japan is a very nice country, but unless you are a tourist and can get the JRP, traveling here is really expensive.
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