The World's Fastest Train Service at greenpropaganda
In the meantime, here's an excerpt, and a copy of the (very boring) first ten minutes of my ride. If you want to see how 330km/hr looks, feel free to fast forward to minute 9 or so. :)
Most Americans do not see any reason to construct high speed rail in the country. Why would anyone want to ride a train when they can just fly? There are of course a slew of environmental ramifications of mass airplane travel, but beyond even these, I have always argued that high speed rail makes a ton of sense. Up until now, the only high speed rail I’d ever been on was in Sweden, on my way back to Lund from the Arctic Circle. Even at high speeds, that trip still took 24 hours – an amount of time that certainly makes even the extraordinarily expensive flight much more attractive.
Thus it was with personal excitement and academic curiosity that I decided to take a ride on the world’s fastest train service. Part of the almost finished high-speed rail from Beijing to Guangzhou – essentially from the far north to the far south of the country – the Wuhan-Guangzhou line covers almost 1000km in just over 3 hours. That’s an average of around 300km/hr, and at its fastest, the train hits something like 350km/hr. For those metrically challenged (don’t feel bad, I used a converter), that’s like 210mph, and right around 190mph on average. It is right now, by far, the fastest train ride on the planet, with higher sustained speeds over longer distances than ever before. When the full line is completed, the trip from Beijing to Guangzhou – which used to take over 24 hours – will be cut in a third, to just eight hours. While still longer than the three-to-four hours it takes to fly between the two places, these are speeds and times that truly do make train travel competitive with flights.
Technical specifications aside, what is the actual trip like? Well, fast of course.... more
First ten minutes of the journey, shot in achingly boring fashion.
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