hello everybody welcome back to another episode of mega projects this one is all about trains that go really really fast we've actually got a episode coming up on the trans-siberian railroad that was a train that went really really slowly this one is all about Japan's basically super trains it's extremely cool I quite like trains it makes me sound a bit sad but I really like this so let's just jump in [Music] there's something marvelous about a train Jenny sat comfortably watching the world slip by without a care in the world the majestic image of Mount Fuji appears in the distance shimmering slightly as if in fact it may not be real Japan is a land of many contradictions ancient customs alongside the very latest in technological advancements suddenly it dawns on you that the Train you're on is travelling incredibly fast you're not rattling or shaking like many trains do no this train is the equivalent of floating peacefully on a cloud at 200 miles per hour it's 320 km/h this is the Shinkansen and I should say that a Japanese pronunciations I got my little pronounciation dictionary right there and do my best but you know it's not gonna be perfect because I am NOT Japanese could you tell no train in the world can compare with the aura of the Japanese Shinkansen standing on a platform as one of these trains pulls in gives you the briefest sense of time traveling there sneek futuristic design is surely from a different age the common English name for the Shinkansen is the bullet train indeed when I looked up how to pronounce it that was the translation it gave me it's a phrase first used in Japan in the 1930s but rarely used in Japan today too the Japanese this is the Shinkansen meaning new trunk line or new main line technically a phrase used to describe both the trains as well as the railway lines beneath them construction of this began back in 1959 and carried its first passengers five years later since then it has become a form of transportation that has revolutionized modern train travel but even today the new generation maglev Shinkansen which will eventually run on the newest line the troll' Shinkansen is light years ahead of what most countries have and currently holds the world train speed record but it's not just the trains of the world novels out during a service which now stretches nearly 60 years and transporting over 10 billion passengers there has not been a single passenger fatality or injury due to a train accident what's more they run pretty much exactly on time so just to recap they're beautiful they're fast they're safe and they're reliable like I said pretty incredible jump in to the history [Music] the idea of high-speed rail travel is of course not brand new there are vast rail networks around the world that I'm sure we'd love to have the kind of services available in Japan unfortunately it's not as easy as just you know putting a new train on some old track the Japanese of develop their Shinkansen system over sixty years not something that happened overnight the nineteen thirties saw the first serious discussion about high-speed rail lines in Japan boy were they ahead of the game by the early 1940s and with the Japanese Imperial March around Asia giving rather well plans were drawn up for an ambitious rail development this was one that would link Tokyo and Beijing via a tunnel to Korea and with other connections to Singapore and also the trans-siberian Express Express like I say we've got a video coming up on that subscribe to this channel so you find out about it I guess but as we know things collapsed long before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japanese forces were capitulating across Asia as Allied forces pushed them back towards their homelands unsurprisingly plans for the rail network to accommodate a Japanese Empire quickly disappeared the immediate years after world war ii were unimaginably hard for many japanese but slowly the country not only emerged from the ashes of war but began to thrive once again however public attitudes in the 1950s towards train travel were in decline like many other nations the Japanese looked to the United States and their vast highway network because surely that was the future but one man in particular he felt strongly about the benefits of high-speed rail in Japan this man's name was Shinji Sogo the presidents of the Japanese National Railway and he managed to convince both the government and the public that this should be the Japanese way in 1958 the Shinkansen project was given governmental approval the following year in April construction began on the first line known as tokaido shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka [Music] less than 20 years after the world's first nuclear attacks Japan hosted the Olympic Games the 1964 Olympics were a far more sedate affair than we're used to today but the city and indeed the country still put on a remarkable show no doubt you go to cement relationships around the world but also to prove that Japan was back it's therefore no surprise to hear that the first Shinkansen opened shortly before the Olympic Games the route between Japan's biggest cities Tokyo and Osaka which normally took six hours and 40 minutes came down to just four hours the following year that time was closer to three hours with further developments along the line taking place the service was a huge success almost immediately of course it's gonna be at Harvard early time after three years it had carried a hundred million passengers and would hit a billion by 1976 it fundamentally changed how business could be conducted in Japan with day trips between cities now just being a common occurrence the original estimated budget was 200 billion yen 1.5 billion pounds or about 1.8 billion dollars however it emerged that estimates have been deliberately underestimated and the real cost was probably double that hey it's the mega Prussia what a surprise it's far more expensive than anyone ever intended [Music] but of course the Shinkansen is far more than just one line seven routes have spread across Japan and now total over 1,700 miles that's over 2,700 kilometers the first extension which was completed in 1975 stretched westward taking in Okayama Hiroshima and Fukuoka this was followed by the Tohoku Shinkansen northeastern Shinkansen which snakes north to amore this was a line that was added to incrementally over 30 years and faced the daunting task of tunneling through Japan's mountainous northern region the awaited Genoa tunnel on the Morioka hachinohe stretch completed in 2000 and stretching 16 miles that's nearly 26 kilometers was briefly the world's longest rail tunnel but its crown was pinched in 2005 when the ACOTA tunnel opened stretching that little bit further to 16 point five miles both have since been blown out of the water by water since opened in Switzerland which could well be a good idea for a future video by the way comment below if you want that and that's the Gotthard base tunnel which comes in at a colossal 35 miles long it's 57 kilometers the Joensuu Shinkansen running first hundred sixty seven point five miles 269.50 m it is between Tokyo and Niigata opens in 1982 and cost a hefty 6.3 billion dollars this particular line was pushed by Prime Minister Tanaka Kakui who strangely enough was a Nagata native if you believe the legends the route was chosen by simply drawing a line on a large map with a red pen without much consultation or geological surveys first well I guess there might be something to simplicity but I'm surprisingly it wasn't an easy ride the high cost of construction service meant that the Japanese national railway was practically insolvent by the early 1980s with reported debts of 28 trillion Japanese yen that's 210 billion pounds or 250 billion dollars this actually led to the privatization of the Shinkansen service in 1987 is now operated by the jr. group a collaboration of seven different companies I guess it was a lot of debt to absorb so what makes all of this so special firstly the Shinkansen service runs on completely different lines than regular trains which partly explains its impressive timekeeping as they don't have to deal with holdups caused by slower trains on the lines no the Shinkansen lines are very fast and very exclusive in 2016 junior reported that the average daliyah Shinkansen train was just 24 seconds UK trains which I grew up using they could learn for it a little from this may be the tracks themselves consist of 1.4 35 meter standard gauge track larger than the normal one point zero six seven narrow gauge and older lines and similar to what is in use around the world because of their speed the Shinkansen drag said the habit of just barreling through obstacles rather than going around them the nature of high-speed train travel tends to work best when you're travelling as close to a straight line as possible and these tracks have a minimum curve radius of 4,000 meters 2500 meters on the oldest line the minimum curve radius is calculated using a number of factors but is primarily focused on how quickly the train can take the curve if you have had a model railway set and you know the train falls off the track as it goes around a corner yeah you don't want that to happen in real life I had a model train kit as kids and honestly I just like making it go really faster boy yeah but not you know when there's real people on board they they would definitely die typically the launch of the curve radius the faster the trains the London Underground has a minimum curve radius of 61 meters well most of the North American rail network uses around a 175 meter radius small slow trains can essentially take a much tighter curve much earlier than a faster train that would need the curve to be spread out over a longer distance the trains themselves are a marvel beautifully designed and with more than a dash of the space age but they are also varied and each line typically uses slightly different models for the sake of speed and convenience we'll just tell you about three the oldest the most current and one that is planned for the future the zero series was the first train in operation on the first line with Japan buildings 3216 of them between 1964 and 1986 they might seem a little dated compared to what is flying through the Japanese country site today but the zero series still came with a maximum speed of a hundred thirty seven miles per hour 220 kilometers an hour not bad for the 1960s as for a comparison trains in the UK during the same period typically had a maximum speed of a hundred miles an hour or 160 kilometers an hour the zero series was finally retired from duty in 2008 okay let's jump ahead a little here let's go to the N 700 s series and this is the latest shrink handsome model with a maximum speed of 186 miles per hour 300 kilometers an hour and a tilting capacity so on curves it can maintain high speed even through them using one of these trains today we'll get you from Tokyo to Osaka in just two hours and 22 minutes and it's a journey of 247 miles that's 397 kilometers which is exactly the same distance between London and Newcastle which would take a standard UK train about one hour longer to complete [Music] the original Tokaido Shinkansen line remains on the busiest in the world connecting at three of Japan's biggest metropolises Tokyo Nagoya and Osaka between March 2016 and March 2017 it carried a hundred and fifty-nine million passengers while its total number since the line opened is estimated to be 5.6 billion passengers that's not the whole network that's just one line a peak times it carries up to 13 trains per hour in each direction with 16 cars each and a 1323 seat capacity there is a minimum gap of three minutes between trains for safety it is simply an astonishingly well-oiled network shuttling vast amounts of people along the line daily and remember there have never been any fatalities in fact there have only ever been two derailments involving the Shinkansen trains the first during the treta earthquake on October the 23rd 2004 and the second on the 2nd of March 2013 when a train on the Akita Shinkansen line derailed in Blizzard conditions okay so you might now be wondering well how much does all of this cost to travel on well it ain't cheap but it's not exactly outrageous a one-way trip between Tokyo and Osaka to our 22 minute journey will set you back around 14,000 yen that's about a hundred pounds or $120 if we use the same UK example lens before with the London to Newcastle journey which is the same distance this would cost you anywhere between 40 and 80 pounds for a standard one-way ticket depending on how early your book TISS you would also see slight variation on the Shinkansen tickets if you purchased in advance but it's not really a service for those on a budget but one of the great benefits that has come from the Shinkansen has been getting back time the results of switching from standard rail travel to high-speed is saving some 400 million hours per year with an estimated economic benefit of 500 billion yen per year that's 3.7 billion pounds or 4.6 billion dollars but how much does it cost to run for such an enormous service this can be difficult to get exact figures but if we include everything from the cost of the Train and the track to electricity maintenance salaries and even juniors debt that it took on the Shinkansen service costs roughly eight hundred and thirty point seven billion yen each year that's about 6.2 billion pounds or seven point six billion dollars this equates to 2.2 billion yen each day about sixteen point six million pounds or twenty point three million dollars a rough estimate of daily ticket sales would be about two point five seven billion yen although sales about 90% come just from the Tokaido Shinkansen line [Music] so as I said earlier the Japanese are not the kind of people to sit back and admire their marvellous achievements no well the Japanese currently have in the pipeline is bigger better and faster than we've ever seen they are not only building a completely new line but they're also putting the finishing touches on a very much next-generation train so let's begin with the train the l0 series is a different game in April 2015 a prototype set a world record for a train speed traveling 375 miles per hour 603 kilometers an hour the train functions with maglev technology which uses an electro dynamic suspension eds system to levitate the Train slightly the trains are accelerated by alternating currents on the ground producing attraction and repulsion forces with coils on the train the Train superconducting magnets at 93 miles per hour raised it off the track by about 10 centimeters its prominent nose which has become a symbol of the Shinkansen stretches for 15 meters 49 feet for better aerodynamics and noise reduction in tunnels these will also be driverless trains that use an automated ground-based system for their operation they will carry crew members on board to tend to the needs of passengers and responds in emergencies and cameras on the front and back will allow for remote control driving in emergency situations okay so that's the train the line itself the Cho Shinkansen will eventually reduce travel time from Tokyo to Osaka to just 67 minutes taking an impressive 5 hours off the same journey in the 1950s and a little over an hour off what is possible today so even basically having the most impressive time that they have today about 90% of the first part of the line between Tokyo and Nagoya will be through tunnels some of which dip down to 40 meters below the surface thanks that surely played into the eye-watering 9 trillion yen cost that's about eighty three billion dollars or 67 billion pounds construction began in 2013 but we're gonna have to wait a while the Tokyo to Nagoya line is scheduled to open in 2027 with the continuation to Osaka opening in 2045 a 4.3 mile 7 kilometer tunnel along the line which is being constructed between the Yamanashi and Shizuoka Prefecture --zz is scheduled for completion in 2025 work also began on a 16 mile 25 kilometer tunnel under the southern Japanese Alps on the 20th of December 2015 and will reach some 1,400 meters that's 4,600 feet below the surface at its deepest point the tunnel which is yet to be named should be completed by 2025 and will become the deepest tunnel in Japan [Music] nowhere in the world will you find a rail system that can even compare to the Shinkansen not just in speed and design but also scope high-speed rail lines are in use or are underway around the world but just about every country lags considerably behind the Japanese when you consider that this project was started in the late 1950s yet begins to understand why like I said at the beginning Japanese live ahead of the game on this one as the threat of climate change looms in our consciousness we will likely think more about sustainable ways of traveling in a perfect world surely we'll all travel on Shinkansen trains we'd all like to be nibbling from a box of delicious takeaway sushi and enjoying the blissful scenery of hurtling to your destination at breakneck speeds so smoothly that sometimes you don't even feel like you're moving this is the good life surely and wouldn't we all love an average delay of just 24 seconds so I really hope you found that video interesting if you did please hit that like button below don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]
