Friday 4 March 2011

Thing #46: go as fast as you can by train

As I was going to travel from Osaka to Tokyo by train I decided to measure its speed using my GPS for Thing #46: go as fast as you can.


My first impression was that of a deja vu! I have been on a train like this before, I thought to myself. Indeed, it turns out Taiwan's High Speed Rail and more specifically the THSR 700T train series is a variant of the 700 Series Shinkansen, built by a consortium of Japanese rolling stock manufacturers. So no surprise that they looked very similar.


GPS recorded about 265 km/h which is not really that fast for high speed rails. What is probably more interesting is the reliability of the the Shinkansen. In 2003, JR Central reported that the Shinkansen's average arrival time was within six seconds of the scheduled time. This includes all natural and human accidents and errors and is calculated over roughly 160,000 Shinkansen trips completed.