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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

I think Japan Railways figured out that a car full of passengers is worth a lot more than a kitchen/restaurant for the other 11 cars.

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Exactly. It costs a lot of money to run a bullet train, and every seat is very valuable. They don't have space to waste on a kitchen or restaurant. They do sometimes have little food carts they'll push up and down the aisles that you can purchase meals from, though this depends on the route and time.

Riding a shinkansen isn't like riding some old-time long-distance train in Europe or North America; it's basically just like riding in an airliner, but on the ground and without TSA and the seats have more legroom. It's all about speed and convenience, not luxury.

There are, however, some luxury trains in Japan on some routes. They're not bullet trains though, and usually meant more for sightseeing travel.

As a counterpoint, German ICEs are just as much of a bullet train as Shinkansen are and they have full dining cars.

It might not actually be profitable, but it sure is sweet.

Maybe not so relevant to the economics of a dining car, but I have to take issue with “just as much of a bullet train”. Shinkansen are proper high speed rail with dedicated tracks, top speeds of 320km/h, and high speeds (260km/h or higher) across basically the entire network.

ICE trains run on the same lines used by slower services, and no train in Germany exceeds 300 km/h, with even that speed being attained only on quite small upgraded parts of the network.

The European rail network most similar to Shinkansen would be TGV.

Spain is also pretty fast.

That has very little to do with the ICE train itself though, which can do above 320 km/h just fine in regular service (on international connections though, since in Germany the global train speed limit is 300 km/h I believe).

While the high-speed tracks in Germany are indeed quite a bit of a patch-work, there are over 1000 km of track certified for >= 250 km/h (as of 2015; quite a number of more lines got finished since then, but I could not find the updated number that included them) and by now really rather long corridors are very high-speed. The route from Munich (south of Germany) to Berlin is now mostly covered with upgraded routes for example. I think the 4 hours for that route are quite competitive to Shinkansen times. The fastest Shinkansen route (from the listed operating speed the only one that actually operates at 320 km/h; all others only operate at 260-300 km/h) is the Tōhoku Shinkansen line, which takes 3 hours and 20 minutes for the same distance traveled.

The lack of dedicated tracks for high-speed passenger service matters a lot though. It’s part of the reason why those (very impressive) scheduled Munich-Berlin times are so often not achieved. The “slot” for the service is relatively small because slower trains (in particular freight) must be scheduled as well, so if the slot is missed for any reason, delays can compound very badly. I take the train between Munich and Berlin reasonably often and it’s usually running late, and sometimes by an hour or more.

Reliability is certainly one aspect where dedicated tracks helps a lot, but is not the only solution (see for example Switzerland). For Germany the issue is the overall too large utilization of the network and the large backlog of required maintenance of the rail infrastructure (in my opinion).

> It's all about speed and convenience, not luxury.

I don’t think this is necessarily true. Gran class seats on a shinkansen are some of the fanciest I’ve seen. It’s not quite like a first class airliner, but I think that’s more related to the shorter journeys.

A lie flat like an airliner has limited value on a train that is at most five hours between Tokyo and Fukuoka.

It would probably be more luxurious to put in private train compartments, which already exist on Japanese trains, but not on Shinkansen due to a capacity crunch.

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