Do you know how long we’ve been able to make trains go very fast?
Japan’s Shinkansen made its public debut in 1964. The first “bullet train,” it safely transported passengers through Japan’s notoriously hilly terrain at the speed of 200 miles per hour. There has never been a death resulting from a Shinkansen accident, and there have only ever been two derailments—one, during a massive earthquake, and the other amidst an extreme blizzard. Over 400 million people ride the Shinkansen every year, and you can find any number of videos on the internet showing exactly how smooth and lovely the ride is.
France’s TGV train has reached 357 miles per hour, though it mostly operates at 200 mph and, like the Shinkansen, has literally never had a fatal accident. China’s maglev trains go 268 miles per hour.
Even further back in the 20th century, American trains somewhat regularly reached speeds of 100 miles per hour in the open air.
A few weeks ago, Virgin Hyperloop made a pod containing two (2) people go 100 miles per hour for 500 meters in a vacuum tube to rapturous press reports.
You know exactly where I’m going with this.
The Virgin Hyperloop’s goal is to create pods that move through a vacuum tube at 760 miles per hour, which means that every person involved in this project is in what is called an “FM” mindset. “FM” in this case stands for “Fucking Magic,” while “AM” stands for “Actual Machines.” VCs and government funding doesn’t need to go into this Fucking Magic train—we do not actually need a train that travels at the speed of sound.
Pods carry less people than trains. Maintaining a vacuum system introduces an infinite number of failure points because the entire system depends on being completely depressurized.
This is a nightmarishly expensive, impractical idea that doesn’t even benefit more than a handful of people at a time, all to travel at speeds that you just don’t need, even when traveling across a continent. The trade-off is a few fewer hours spent in transit for an expensive, inefficient, far less safe option. So of course it appeals to every Melon Usk fanboy out there, the children who live in the world of Fucking Magic.
But in the world of Actual Machines? We already have trains that can transport large numbers of people extremely fast and very, very safely. You do not need a vacuum tube to do this—in fact, putting large numbers of people in a vacuum tube is just asking for mass death.
So why… aren’t we building these trains? At one point, the richest men in America all made their bones from the railroad industry—steel and oil and the railroad operators themselves. Replaced as soon as Henry Ford was able to mass-produce a product that appealed to an American individualism that Ford and his fellow consumerists honed into our defining feature as a nation. Go wherever you want, whenever you want! Never have to share a seat with someone else! Never have to rub elbows with your inferiors! The automobile will set you free.
Instead of rails, we turned to roads. Now, we can’t even afford to keep the roads working. High-speed rail projects are proposed in plenty of places, only to be voted down or, worse, gutted by politicians who receive money from oil lobbyists. Instead, we buy more and more cars that increasingly look like military vehicles, and use them to murder thousands of people each year.
As ruinously shitty as the railroad barons were—as much as they used their ungodly wealth to fuck over their workers and create monopolies and wriggle out of safety regulations—they at least built trains that transported large quantities of people and freight. I do not want to bring back the railroad barons. But building a network of public high-speed rail is an infinitely better use of money and labor than throwing these things at fucking magic solutions.
Just. Build. A fucking. Train.
There have been deaths resulting from Shinkansen accidents and there have been many more derailments than two. Five workers died in Shizuoka in 1964 from getting hit by a train. A child died in 1983 from getting hit by a train. Two workers died in Iwate in 1985 from getting hit by a train. A teenager died at Mishima Station in 1995 after getting stuck in the door of a departing train.
Since 2000, derailments have happened in 2004, 2008, 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2022.