95.5 - Blog Posts
Director/writer of "The B.C. Butcher" Kansas Bowling talking with KLOS!
www.igg.me/at/thebcbutcher
Japan's rail speed record holder: 300X
Sticking with the Tôkaidô Shinkansen and the SCMaglev & Railway Park, this is the (highly abridged) story of the fastest conventional train in Japan.
Following privatisation and sectorisation in the 1980s, and seeing France and Germany take the lead in the high-speed train department, the three JR companies that had Shinkansen lines set about catching up to offer 300 km/h services where they could. The aerodynamics and sheer weight of the venerable 0 Series and its derivatives weren't going to cut it, so each company designed a prototype train to test new technologies.
JR Tôkai's solution was 300X, officially Shinkansen Class 955 - numbers starting with 9 are trains not open to the public, either prototypes or work trains like Class 923 "Doctor Yellow". Launched two years after JR West's WIN350 and JR East's STAR21, it featured two radically different end cars. The more elegant one, in my opinion, is on display at JR Tôkai's museum in Nagoya, while the other is preserved at JR Group's research centre in Maibara. The intermediate cars have all been scrapped.
The three prototypes took turns to hold the national rail speed record, and, 300X being the last, it took the record last, and holds it to this day. We mentioned the fact that the Tôkaidô Shinkansen still had too many relatively tight turns, but the Maibara to Kyôto stretch is the best part, and that's where this train hit 443 km/h in 1996. This video may, or may not, be that run, but it still looks very fast - note the unusually large, "flying saucer" pantograph cowlings.
Unless JR East decide to go completely bonkers with their ALFA-X prototype, it's unlikely that the record is going to be beaten any time soon. It's not in the spirit of these trains, they are pure test beds and run quite extensively with the aim of increasing service speeds. Records also require special preparation of the tracks, which is why the French TGVs made their 1990 and 2007 record runs before the opening of a brand new line.
But JR Tôkai have gone much faster with their Maglev programme, which holds the world speed record for passenger trains outright with 603 km/h. Behind 300X at the museum is a predecessor of that record holder, MLX01, the first Maglev train to clock over 500 km/h. Again, this is not (just) showboating, the lengthy test programme's main aim is to prove that consistent service at very high speed with this technology is feasible, so that the Maglev Chûô Shinkansen can achieve this when it opens (if Yamanashi-ken can agree on a route).