1. Introduction:
This post was drafted in the middle of December, 2015. It is being published today (January 29, 2016) without further ado, almost as it was then
Bullet trains were very much in the news recently, what with the Japan-India agreement, last December, to build a bullet train link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. This is a distance of 550 km -- which the new, $14.7bn, investment will reduce from about 8 hours of travel-time to just 2. I just got the urge to seize the moment to share on twitter a few videos of bullet trains in Japan and elsewhere, and to indulge my interest in them. A couple of Japanese train stations quickly wormed their way into the visual array. And then it became necessary to add a historical touch to the whole kahuna, though this required a greater expenditure of time than I thought I should devote to this particular post, certainly right then. So be it. Then I shifted my platform from Twitter (which I will surely pivot back to when this post is done, whenever) to Blogger -- which allows for a more extended conversation with oneself et al. All this because Kenya's own SGR is on the way, so that we're feeling a kindred Ness of spirit with the rest of the high-speed world. So here we are: I thought the visuals would tell a better story of the awesomeness of the trains than any verbal account could.
Here's one of the videos that I tweeted: Video of a Japanese Below-Ground Train Station
Here's yet another: The Shinkansen Bullet Train, Maximum Speed 320 km/h
History's first passenger train, running on iron rails, was, by default rather than design, launched in Britain in 1830. The initial idea behind trains was not at all passenger travel, but rather the cost-effective delivery of cargo: heavy ware (coal, machinery, parts), or things, of all sorts. Indeed, the first train transport had been launched precisely for the movement of cargo a little earlier, in 1825. But serendipity had gotten in the way and changed the world, and the culture, of travel. Serendipity, in this case, materializing as a potent mix of imagination and a sudden, unprecedented, opportunity-driven urge in the manual cargo handlers on board to become themselves, and perhaps a few joy-rider friends, the very 'cargo', so to speak, that they were handling. The rest is that history.
Let's go back in time a little, in order to more appropriately come up to speed:
Before the fear of flying -- nowadays much remarked upon, since Erica Jong's best-selling 1970s book by that title -- there was in the mix, in earlier days, just as deep-rooted a fear of train travel in some people. Trains in and of themselves invoked existential fear, and not necessarily in those who newly traversed the countryside in them. Thus it is that at least one prominent leader in 19th-century rural America is on record fearfully remarking:
"As you well know, Mr. President....carriages
are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by "engines"
which in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort
their way through the countryside ,setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock
and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people
should travel of such breakneck speed" [Letter from the Government of New York to President
Andrew Jackson on the rail roads, quoted in Sir Frank Mcfadzean (1980: 92), "the Entrepreneur in the private and public Sectors" in Israel Kirzner et al (1980) Prime Mover of Progress: The Entrepreneur in Capitalism and Socialism. Lancing, Sussex: The Institute of Economic Affairs. [Quote also appears in World Economic Journal, Vol.2,
1979 p. 342].
Trains, and Zahara's father's long absences, are the reason she, Zahara, sang that iconic song, Loliwe. They are the reason a decision was made by the colonizer's agents, at the beginning of the 20th century, to locate Nairobi where it is so indubitably located even today. Trains are the reason I and my siblings grew up there/here.
Enough of the commonplace train. Let us now turn our attention to bullet trains.
2. Bullet Train: History and Documentaries:
JUST READ: Time's Brief History of Bullet Trains
3. Japan: Video ~ The Shinkansen Bullet Train (Maximum Speed 320 km/h):
4, European Version of Bullet Trains:
CLICK: A European version of the bullet train.
5. Shanghai, China Bullet Train (Video):
6. (a) Gautrain, Johannesburg (Video):
6. (b) Gautrain, NPRNews (Audio Coverage):
Listen Here
7. READ: Japan's High-Speed Trains Gaining Ground in US
8. Where we are With Kenya's high Speed Train Project?
READ: Update on Kenya's high speed train project
9. CONCLUSION:
Still waiting for the bullet (T)rain across the Rift
