Quote of the Day (Matthew Engel, on Why ‘A Successful Public Transport System is a National Benefit’)

“A successful public transport system is a national benefit. Japan, China and most of western Europe accept it explicitly. For much of the world, the past 40 years have indeed been the second age of the train. British politicians get the point implicitly but execute policy furtively and cack-handedly; only American Republicans are visceral and obstructive deniers.”— British journalist Matthew Engel, “Slow Train Coming,” The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015

It escaped my attention a few weeks ago until I noticed Leo Lewis’ excellent recent retrospective in The Financial Times: late last month, Japan celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the first bullet train. Since that event, the nation has steadily improved its high-speed railroad system, the shinkansen, with the fastest train, the Hayabusa, now reaching 320 km/h.

In contrast, the fastest train in the US, Amtrak’s Acela—currently running at 150 miles per hour—will, even with a new model announced for 2024 but still with no set date at this point in the year, only reach 160 mph/h, or 258 km/h.

For several reasons, within the lifetimes of older baby boomers, the U.S. railroad system has declined in importance even as the automobile and the airplane become more entrenched. has declined. For the sake of a diversified transportation system and healthy economy, more needs to be done to revive the industry. It should be beyond partisan politics.

Continued decline or even stagnation of the industry is not inevitable. A high-functioning rail system can be not just a signal of industrial innovation but even a point of national pride, as Lewis points out in noticing that the Tokyo-to-Osaka line opened just ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, making the two events “symbols of Japan’s great postwar resurrection.”

But upgrading a rail system will not only require a can-do spirit but eternal vigilance. As Lewis observes:

“Despite the appearance of effortless service, punctuality and performance, Japan knows full well that everything is, in fact, attributable to unstinting effort. It is no coincidence that, in the same year it opened the shinkansen, Japan Railways invented an alarm clock which could not, under any circumstances, be slept through (thanks to an inflatable balloon under the mattress).”

(The image accompanying this post, the Shinkansen N700A Series Set G13 high speed train travelling at approximately 300 km/h through Himeji Station—an image captured with a line-scan camera using strip photography—was taken Aug. 19, 2017, by Dllu.)