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Comment by pibaker | Hacker News Reader

Edit: someone down this thread pointed out the answer is likely written by AI. If you copy the whole post from GP into ChatGPT it will give you an answer very similar to the post I am replying to.

> Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services.

Not true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYol11bVoNw

https://ameblo.jp/nakamurapon943056/entry-12488005292.html

> but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.

Spanish high speed trains mostly run on their own tracks because of gauge differences. France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.

It is surprising how many upvotes you can get on the internet just by glazing the Japanese.

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There are some lines that were originally built as regular narrow gauge railways and later converted to standard gauge supporting Shinkansen trainsets.

This is called Mini-Shinkansen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Shinkansen

This comes with limitations, as the maximum track speed on these converted lines is apparently around 130 km/h.

None of the actual Shinkansen stadard lines have level crossings.

The answer was almost certainly generated by an LLM.

I tried asking ChatGPT if Japanese high speed rail has level crossings and it correctly identified the line I used as my counterexample (Yamagata Shinkansen). I think GP is just plainly misinformed in a more boring way.

If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment. Also, "Finally, ..." and "it's not A, it's B" is a good tell.

Damn, I tried doing what you did and got a similar response too, down to exact wordings like "short answer, long answer" and "conservative maintenance". I will admit i was too quick to dismiss the accusation in my previous reply.

> If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment.

But would it have generated almost the same comment 4 hours ago, when the comment was posted here?

A few months ago I posted a comment in a thread about some new law that would not have been needed if a law from many years early had not seemingly arbitrarily limited itself to some particular cases. I speculated on some reasons why the original law might have been written that way.

A couple hours later I asked an LLM about it (Perplexity) and it gave the same reasons I had guessed. I checked the links it provided to get a suitable reference if the topic ever came up again...and it turned out my comment was its source!

"thing; thing, Japan" is a meme for a reason. I was wondering how long it would take to appear in this thread.

> Short answer: Japan treats high-speed rail as a tightly controlled system, not just fast trains on tracks.

Is exactly what a text bot would say. Eloquent, but when you think about it, is just nonsense. Which operator treats HSR as "fast trains on tracks" and which does not treat it is a "tightly controlled system"?

That's nitpicking, IMO. It's still 99% true. There are just two "Mini-Shinkansen" lines, they only run once or twice per hour, are shorter than non-Mini-Shinkansen, and only a relatively short part (distance-wise) of their journey is spent on the slow tracks. There are non-Shinkansen trains on the Mini-Shinkansen portion of their journey, but not very many. (Also the word "shinkansen" implies new tracks.)

> France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.

At least in France, high speed trains on older tracks won't go as fast as on the dedicated high speed tracks

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