Fast Trains

The book I read to research this post was Fast Trains by Nancy Nagle Bolts et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. In britain we have the eurostar which doesn't go that fast in this country due to track limitations but I think gradually things are improving in that respect. The chunnel or channel tunnel which goes under the english channel has been called one of the seven wonders of the modern world and is actually 3 tunnels, 1 service tunnel and 1 each going to and from france. The eurostar is a form of TGV the french high speed train and these cover most of the long distance routes in france. It's interesting that air france scrapped its paris - brussels because of competition from the TGV. There is talk of a tunnel going under the bering straits which would link america with asia via alaska. This would be a 64 mile tunnel. China leads the world in high speed train use and has more high speed rail infrastructure, 16,000 miles in fact than the rest of the world put together. There is a 200 mph rail link between shanghai and beijing which does the trip in around 5 hours. It features the second longest bridge and the longest tunnel in the world. There is a 311 mph maglev link between shanghai and its airport but it's difficult to appreciate its speed due to it being a short distance. There is a high speed train linking barcelona to madrid in spain. Spain is very keen to have a high speed rail infrastructure. Japan of course was the first to have high speed rail with the bullet train see my article on the bullet train at http://scratbagroberts.com
Japan developed a high speed steam train network prior to the second world war but these were scrapped during this conflict. A high speed rail network made a lot of sense because there are many outlying cities around tokyo that needed to be connected.