China's 450kmph bullet train is the fastest ever built
executivetraveller.com
executivetraveller.com
e.g. even a small earthquake that shifts the tracks a few inches would probably cause, at minimum, a degradation in service.
I know that modern roller coasters are outfitted with a bunch of stress, vibration, conductivity, etc sensors. There’s a theme park near me where huge fast roller coasters run all day every day all season. The speeds aren’t as high but I bet given the twists and turns the stresses and tolerances are worse.
Having all trains inspect the track is feasible. The latest round of Shinkansen trains does that. They're moving away from running a Dr. Yellow track inspection train every 10 days.[1]
[1] https://www.railway.supply/n700s-trains-to-be-equipped-with-...
More lanes on the highway are not progress.
Now it feels like it was just lack of competition. Maybe now other countries will start producing lines and trains capable of 400 Kph and hopefully its not a China only thing going forward.
While it is technically proven that it is possible to do 400+km/h on rail, it's not practical: maintenance, wear, noise, turns, embranchement, and overall cost, ... many considerations that are probably less important for Chinese railway now, which needs some "show".
of course the above is all about compromise and you can emphasize whatever numbers you want to get different results.
Edit: it is often a good idea to have everything capable of faster speeds - say 350km/h. You don't normally want to use those speeds, but if a train gets delayed (as happens) you can use that extra speed to make up time. Just don't let this become a normal thing.
No idea how much the wings would add versus the lift help.
the wings on race cars are poited down - they increase weight to keep the car on the ground at the expense of more drag, which they overcome with a bigger engine (and more fuel use)
So running a train at 350kph is more expensive than 300kph, both in per-distance and pre-unit time terms. But if you can run more services that way then sufficient demand might make it economical. Also, if it's too slow, people may choose flying instead.
Maglev can go even faster but those have never been made economical, really. It's much more complicated and expensive.
It's a bit like how commercial planes have actually gotten slower. 747s used to fly closer to Mach 0.9. Now most commercial planes fly at around Mach 0.8. There are physical problems flying between Mach 0.8 and 1.2 but sometimes that doesn't matter so the best private planes top out at about Mach 0.93. Even then they rarely fly that fast.
Flying an aircraft at max cruise can save a lot of time on longer flights, but it's also substantially more expensive.
> Perhaps oddly, this is superior to first class, where seats are arranged in a 2-2 layout; second class carriages have a tighter 2-3 configuration.
I guess the writer of the article does not really ride trains, the terminology is different from airlines.
First class just means better than second class (it's usually a bit better), and 2-2 seat configurations are very common. "Business class" in trains is a neologism.
What's that, mach 586?
Seems a bit excessive.
Come on now.
No one else is remotely close to their network and won't be for a long time.
But thanks for stating the obvious.
Of course, anyone caring about correctness would use the SI unit symbol, which is m/s.