The Need for Speed

[kevin_standlee]

Before I turn in for the night, a commentary on what high speed rail means here in relationship to California distances. (Calculated on rough crow-flies distances.) Today I did the rough equivalent of boarding a train in San Diego at 7:53 AM, taking a train to Fresno and changing for Stockton, arriving at 12:34 PM, then spending around five hours there before boarding a train for Chico at 5:33 PM and continuing on to Chico, arriving 6:44 PM.

At one point, the display on the train announced that we were traveling at 285 km/h (around 175 MPH). And that's not the fastest of the trains -- our rail passes don't cover the fastest expresses.

Comments

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

whumpdotcom and I decided to go to Hiroshima on Friday; we sprung for the extra surcharges for the Nozomi Tokaido shinkansen and the green car, and it looks like we get from Tokyo Station to Hiroshima in a little over four hours. w00t! Today, the Tohoku shinkansen was our friend when we went to Nikko.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The big question to my mind is not so much distance, as importance of destination. Does Japan have trains that fast, and more importantly that frequent, to places as relatively small, and as far off the main routes, as Chico is?

[kiltnihonside.livejournal.com]

A lot of small cities got shinkansen stations when the routes were being laid out. A local pol with enough clout would pressurise the shinkansen committees to put in a station even though the expected passenger traffic didn`t justify it. The Sanyo shinkansen line running from Tokyo to Hakate has well over twenty stations along its length.

My favourite Japanese town, Onomichi, has a shinkansen station (Shin-Onomichi) up in the hills quite a distance away from the regular JR line station. The limited expresses like Hikari RailStar and the Nozomi don`t stop there. Only a few regular Hikari and stopping Kodama services do. When I`ve used those services, typically only three or four people get on or off in a given stop at Shin-Onomichi. The normal JR station down by the waterfront gets a lot of commuter traffic plus a steady stream of other passenger traffic during the day (plus a lot of fast freight routed past the platforms).

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I was trying to show distance. It's impossible to show relative importance of cities relative to only California because California's important cities don't cluster on a single axis stretching from San Diego to, say, north of Redding. If the cities of the Bay Area were in the Central Valley, and Sacramento and Stockton were up around where Medford and Redding are, you'd get a very rough idea of what I'm talking about.

And cities like Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Osaka, and Yokohama are indeed important cities. Hakata-Fukuoka, where I'm staying tonight and tomorrow, is the south end of the Shinkansen line, and an important transport hub for the area. I suppose it's maybe like being able to get on a train in San Jose, be in Los Angeles or San Diego -- or other major cities of the metro area -- for lunch, and be back home by dinner time.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I like trains; trains are cool. And the stations take less space than airports, so they can often be more conveniently located (business stuff does tend to grow up around an airport, so the airport is about optimally located for that stuff; hence "often" rather than "always"). Faster trains are cooler.

Also, the train world hasn't reacted to the few train terrorism incidents nearly as stupidly as the airplane world has, so you aren't spending as much time clearing security when getting on a train.

But mostly, trains are cool :-).

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

What is this "clearing security" thing of which you speak? We show our rail passes at the gate and roll on through, then try to find our track. The only thing slowing us down is carrying a couple of pieces of luggage and not being familiar with the stations; otherwise, we probably could get there, say, five minutes before departure and we'd be okay. But you knew that.

And yes, trains are very cool.

[davidshallcross.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Nozomi actually has a higher maximum speed, it just makes fewer stops, so it can have a higher average speed.

I hope you also take a rural local train. It's quite a contrast from the shinkansen.

David

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

That is correct. All the Shinkansen have roughly the same top speed, but the three levels of service have different numbers of stops. We're trying to avoid the Kodomas that stop everywhere, sticking to the Hikaris that make limited stops, and will only pay the full fare (not even a supplement but a full fare, bleah) Nozomi if there is no other practical way to get where we want to go when we want to do it.

We've already taken some urban locals, like the train from the station near the Pacifico down to Ofuna, and a semi-rural local, in the form of the private railroad near Kamakura that we found just charming with its street running that betrays its origins as a converted tramway. The irritating thing is that I simply can't spend the time these trips deserve to write up what we did because if I did, I wouldn't get any sleep, and I'm not getting enough as it is.

Wrong Continent?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

In case anyone wonders -- and given the folks who read this LJ, I bet at least one of you has -- the reason I have a Eurostar icon illustrating talk of Japanese high speed trains is because I haven't got round to putting a Shinkansen photo in my user icons. I have plenty of them on the cameras here, but taking the time to do anything with them has been a problem. I find it difficult to justify spending that much time on vacation in Japan hunched over a computer, and Lisa is jealous enough of my doing so as it is.