F
or many of us, the daily train commute is a
slow, boring necessit y, but what if you could
travel at a mind-bending 430 kilometres (267
miles) per hour? That is the realit y for passengers
travelling on the world’s fastest train, the
Shanghai Maglev.
High-speed trains have been around since
1964, when a line bet ween Tok yo and Osaka in
Japan was built to reach speeds of 210 kilometres
(130 miles) per hour. This shortened the time it
took to travel between two of Japan’s largest cities
dramatically, and the world’s love of high-speed
rail was born.
Many of the world’s fastest trains today use
magnetic lev itation to achieve daily speeds that
are over six times the British motor way limit.
However, high-speed travel is possible without
using magnets. Britain has plans for its second
high-speed rail track, from London to Manchester
and Leeds v ia Birmingham, called HS2. The
project’s technical director, Professor A ndrew
McNaughton, explains there are other ways to
achieve super-speed. “The point of contact
bet ween the steel wheel and the steel track isonly the size of your fi ngernail, so we are not too
worried about friction, plus the energ y required
to levitate a train is huge”, he says. “HS2 will have
100 horsepower, which is four times more than
[in] normal trains. It will only stop at a few
stations so won’t have to slow down and speed up
often at all.”
The proposed HS2 train will drastically reduce
the time it takes to get between the south and
north parts of England by simply using a more
powerful engine and fewer stops. However, even
though the engine is more powerful, it doesn’t
actually use that much more energ y. The train
will use a big burst of power to get up to speed and
essentially coast along after that. It will be able to
reach a top speed of 360 kilometres (224 miles) per
hour and have an average speed of 230 kilometres
(143 miles) per hour on its cross-country journey.
This will halve the time it takes to get from
London to Manchester.
Whether they are suspended in the air or
equipped with a monster of an engine to get them
off the starting line, high-speed trains are
revolutionising the way we travel.While magnetically driven trains seem to be the
f uture, back in 1966, rockets were all the rage, so
naturally someone decided to pop a couple onto a
train to see how fast they could go. That person
was New York Central Railroad engineer Don
Wetzel. He was engaged in an experiment to see
how fast he could make a train travel, so used t wo
General Electric J47-19 jet engines on a Budd Rail
Diesel Car train w ith a modifi ed nose for extra
streamlining. They named it the Black Beetle and
on one r un it hit a monumental 295.6 kilometres
(183.7 miles) per hour. This remains the record for
the fastest train ever to r un in the USA, but
Wet zel’s idea wa sn’t to la st. Roc ket-powered
trains did not become a v iable alternative to
steam or electric as they were expensive, diffi cult
to source and provided unmanageable amounts
of thrust for commercial use.Jet-powered trains
DID YOU KNOW? On average, each central Japanese bullet train arrives within six seconds of its scheduled arrival