Word: tokaido
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Across paddyfields, through mountains and over highways last week streaked the world's fastest long-haul train, slithering like an ivory worm along the 320 miles of rail between Tokyo and Osaka. For the first full test run of Japan's $1 billion New Tokaido Line, the super-express Hikari averaged 80 m.p.h. and often went as high as 125 m.p.h. Crowds waved and cheered, highway traffic stopped to watch, and planes of newsmen circled overhead. Japan was greeting not only a new rail service but a symbol of the nation's postwar industrial growth...
...Hikari covered the run in a record 3 hr. 56 min. When regular service opens Oct. 1-ten days before the Olympic Games begin-some of the line's 60 passenger trains a day will make the run in four hours v. 6½ over the parallel Old Tokaido Line. The new line took five years to build, and skirts the sea for most of the way; its architects did away completely with grade crossings, designed 548 bridges, 66 tunnels and 57 miles of elevated right of way. The specially built streamlined trains are models of luxury and, unlike...
...heart. The scenic green seaboard between Tokyo and Osaka-containing only 16% of Japan's land-holds 43% of its population and half of its 500,000 factories. The lone highway between the two cities is hopelessly jammed. Planes fly often, but fares are high. And the Old Tokaido Line, opened in 1891, is so clogged with a quarter of the nation's passenger and freight traffic that passengers often reserve seats a fortnight ahead, marshaling yards overflow with goods, and maintenance crews repair tracks, with stopwatch timing, between trains only minutes apart...
...glistening 22-mile stretch of railroad south of Tokyo one day last week, Engineer Morio Yamamoto opened his throttle for a test high-speed run on the New Tokaido Line. Almost imperceptibly, Yamamoto's electric locomotive purred into power, skimmed like an arrow past paddyfields and rolling hills. Smiling with satisfaction, a Japanese National Railways executive announced to invited passengers that the train was moving at its programmed speed of 200 kilometers an hour (124 m.p.h.). "Nothing to it at all," beamed Yamamoto...
When it opens full service on the 320-mile run between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964, the New Tokaido will be the world's fastest train. Bullet-shaped locomotives will whip 108 passenger trains daily over twelve miles of bridges, through 40 miles of tunnel and around gentle curves at speeds averaging 105 m.p.h. This is considered too fast for human engineers; computers will control the trains most of the way, with speeds and slowdowns for stops programmed on tape. Running time will be cut to three hours, from 6½ hours on the parallel Old Tokaido Line...