"this mistaken impression that the best is in the past, the present is terrible, and everything is always getting worse all the time. This attitude of course isn't just in the railfan community; it's everywhere."
My main experience with train travel is in Japan where they have a couple of lovingly-maintained steam locomotives that run excursions every now and then. The rest of it is the Hayabusa, Mizuho and Sakura shinkansens running at 320km/hr meeting their timetables to the second. A few years back I was lucky enough to ride one of the older 0 series shinkansens, first introduced as "the future" in the far-off 1960s. The compartment I was in still had the brag display, an 8-segment LED speed indicator that showed its max speed to be about 210km/hr which is why this flagship had been demoted to the Kodama stopping service, the slowest of the shinkansens. You could tell how slow it was, it still had a dining car in the rack complete with a hot-food kitchen (unused). With modern shinkansens you have to be content with a trolley dolly selling bentos, coffee and green tea because you'll be at your destination before you could pick up your chopsticks at a sit-down meal.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-09-20 04:26 pm (UTC)My main experience with train travel is in Japan where they have a couple of lovingly-maintained steam locomotives that run excursions every now and then. The rest of it is the Hayabusa, Mizuho and Sakura shinkansens running at 320km/hr meeting their timetables to the second. A few years back I was lucky enough to ride one of the older 0 series shinkansens, first introduced as "the future" in the far-off 1960s. The compartment I was in still had the brag display, an 8-segment LED speed indicator that showed its max speed to be about 210km/hr which is why this flagship had been demoted to the Kodama stopping service, the slowest of the shinkansens. You could tell how slow it was, it still had a dining car in the rack complete with a hot-food kitchen (unused). With modern shinkansens you have to be content with a trolley dolly selling bentos, coffee and green tea because you'll be at your destination before you could pick up your chopsticks at a sit-down meal.