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French Train Breaks Speed Record
Josh Fink writes "A French train on the TGV line has broken the wheeled train speed record - again. At a speed of 350 miles per hour, they came close to breaking the all time record of 361 miles per hour, held by a Japanese maglev train. It was last broken back in 1990. From the article: 'The TGV, short for "train a grande vitesse," as France's bullet trains are called, is made up of three double-decker cars between two engines. It has been equipped with larger wheels than the usual TGV to cover more ground with each rotation and a stronger, 25,000-horsepower engine, said Alain Cuccaroni, in charge of the technical aspects of testing.'"
Yes, but can it answer riddles?
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a stronger, 25,000-horsepower engine
25000hp and most of it is used to push air in front of, and around the train. I wonder how much it would cost to build a vaccuum tunnel to run very high speed train in at a fraction of the power required by the TGV...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Even in France, 9 in 10 passenger miles are not by rail.
Deleted
One little engine that could, and a whole lot of others that think they can *sigh*
Life is choochoo - all aboard!
It has been equipped with larger wheels than the usual TGV to cover more ground with each rotation and a stronger, 25,000-horsepower engine
And they would have beat the overall record, except that at the last second they decided to add an aftermarket spoiler, a 40,000 watt subwoofer and ground effects.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
I watched it this morning, and right around 1:35, there's a shot of the train passing under a bridge. It was really difficult for me to comprehend just how fast 350MPH is until I saw this particular shot. Man, that thing is fast!
in the united states, we do not need to waste taxpayers hard earned money on useless, socialist, centralized, bureaucratic monstrosities like supersonic trains.
in america, each person is an individual, with their own car. or preferably, SUV, since cars tend to get smashed. also SUVs can go 'offroading', an enjoyable diversion that reddens the blood coursing through the veins of every freedom loving american, alone on the frontier, conquering nature for the benefit of human civilizaton.
enough of these cheese eating wine sipping communards and their piffle trains. let them all get tuberculosis in the over crowded rat cans called 'passenger cars' and wallow in their dying economy as it goes down a black hole to overspent big-government ruin and waste.
au revoir, les suckers!
So apparently maglev has little or no speed advantage over old-fashioned wheeled trains. I assume there's still an energy savings, but currently that doesn't seem to outweigh the extra cost of maglev infrastructure. Perhaps when energy costs rise a tad more...
One little detail has me curious: TGVs, though electric, still use locomotives to push and/or pull the train, a design feature that's been around since the first steam trains in 1833. I seem to recall "futurists" like Arthur Clarke claiming that the train of the future would use lots of small motors connected to each wheel instead of one big one in a locomotive. Not practical?
that's 574.8 km/h
Rail done correctly is by far a better solution for high density traffic than automobiles. No parking problems, accidents, traffic conjestion, or road rage to worry about. No endless stream of internal combustion engines with associated CO2 emissions and other nastyness.
The major problem is being crammed in with a lot of other people, some of whom may not be at all polite or tolerable. Security on such trains needs to be well maintained, and probably different cars with a people density/cost tradeoff. The Dallas light rail system (DART) which opened up a few years ago started on a good note - the major problem was too many people wanting to ride it from too far out. In theory, this might be handled with running more lines in parallel as the rail system gets closer to the center of the city - it's an interesting problem. (Of course, the expense of putting a rail system through a city not designed to accomidate it is non-trivial...)
Regardless, I think the more efficient resource utilization of trains makes them a no-brainer for long term development. The US is lamentably far behind - Amtrack is stuck playing second fiddle to freight trains and has abysmal performance (I'm probably biased as I was once 17 hours late on a train...). Freight rail and passenger rail need different tracks and independent scheduling - freight can move more slowly over rougher tracks, but passenger rail needs to be rapid.
I have always wondered if a properly designed and implemented rail system across the US would be cheaper than air travel (and not all THAT much slower, for bullet trains, particularly given delays airports can introduce...) I guess it's the old bootstrap problem - no money to lay down tracks because there is no guarantee of return on investment, while air travel already has massive inertia behind it and a lot of financial clout to use on the political system.
I hope someday we can muster the political will to build a rail infrastructure the way we have built a highway infrastructure, because there may well come a time when raw materials are too expensive to make building massive car fleets and replacing them every few years economically viable. It would be nice to have a fast, inexpensive way to travel that is actually able to provide reliability.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I keep thinking that Amtrak could do a 150mph goods service. Link 10 cities or so in each state to each other by rail corridors e.g. San Diego, L.A., San Francisco, Sacramento, Bakersfield. Transport containerized goods only. Drive down costs through streamlining the process.
Throw out everything that is not needed to move the containers, computerize everything e.g. no driver. Automatic marshaling yards. etc. etc. Could we get a 40ton container coast to coast for less than $100 in less than 24hrs?
But I guess we'll have to let China do that as we have to much political inertia to try something that radical.
A passenger jet, supposedly, harms the environment as much per passenger, as five passenger cars would over the same distance — if you ignore the impact of building and maintaining the roads.
What's the impact of these trains — including the building and maintaining of the suitable tracks?
One must also note, that the overall (door-to-door) speed advantage, these machines seem to have over airplanes at short and medium distances, is due to the much simpler security/registration procedures, the passengers have to go through to board them. It is not the technology, that requires us to come to the airport 2 hours prior to departure...
What upsets me, is that American "Acela" train can also run pretty fast (even if not as fast as these bullet-trains) — but is not, because the tracks aren't suitable for higher speeds. The moron-run Amtrak has purchased these wonder-trains without improving the tracks, so most of the speed you buy on Acela is due to it simply making less stops between, say, New York and Boston, rather than due to it running appreciably faster.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
High speed trains are definitely a better way to go on that score.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
French Train Breaks Speed Record
Yes, but in forward or reverse? Ba-zing!
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The TGV has an equivalent impact to 1.2 gas liter/100km/passenger , which translates to 196 MPG.
It's by far the cleanest widespread transportation means around. (yes, widespread around here, I live in France and my hometown is now 1 hour away from Paris, down from 2, which is pretty cool )
A gasoline engine is only about 25% efficient, so the dragster has to dump at least 24,000 hp as heat from a much smaller volume. However, top fuel dragsters are probably much more inefficient than 25%; IIRC, they burn several gallons of nitromethane in a 5-second 1/4 mile. By my calculations, if they burn 4 gallons in 5 seconds, that's a rate of 52,000 hp of chemical energy, most of which must be dissipated as waste heat.
What an amazing train. When I see things like this, or ride the EuroRail or any trains in Japan, and I think of the train system in the US, I become so deeply saddened.
For anyone that hasn't rode trains in the US, I'll sum it up for you. They are a joke. Amtrak is a joke. They cannot get it together to create a train infrastructure that works efficiently and affordably. Most of them barely go faster than 55 MILES per hour. That's right, miles. There is little in the way of luxury or services with some exception and for a high price. There are some new trains coming on line in some areas, but in general they are worse than they were 100 years ago.
You might ask, "What about all those old movies I've seen with people traveling in elegant dining cars and trips on sleeping cars"? We did have more train routes in the past. There were also lots of light rail cars, electric and horse drawn before those. 'El' lines along with subways. We had elegant train stations (old Pennsylvania Station, NYC, demolished in the 60's for the new Madison Square Garden, &c.). The truth is most of these train lines were purchased by subsidiary companies of GM (General Motors) and the oil industry. They systematically dismantled them. Local routes were replaced by buses. Basically they encouraged the movement of every american to purchase their own automobile. At least one. Peoples experience with the public transportation would become frustrating enough that they would simply not want to deal with it. Those lines that were not completely converted to buses (Amtrak), have been intentionally mismanaged to the point that they are completely incompetent.
I would love to see the USA join the rest of the modern world with an intelligent approach to transportation, instead of building more highways, but it doesn't appear to be coming down the 'pike.
Believe it.
The moron-run Federal government won't give Amtrak enough money to improve the tracks, because it's spending it all subsidizing highways (while somehow expecting Amtrak to make a profit) instead.
Don't blame Amtrak for its inability to compete against a subsidy!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You laugh, but yeah, that's half the point. What's the other half? Well, see, the French may like to run away, but they are pretty clever.
So here's the idea: Some army (lets say the Germans) are chasing after the French. The French all jump on board their super TGV, which takes off down the track. The Germans stop on the track and say "Ha ha! They are running away! We can't catch their train, but we can just follow it to wherever they went, the fools!" So they start racing down the track following the French train. Meanwhile, far down the track, the French stop the train and get off, and go hide in the woods. The last one to go sets the train in reverse and opens the throttle. Now the last thing the Germans would expect is for the French train to come back, so they're caught completely off guard by the 400MPH TRAIN IN THE KISSER!
When you are truly skilled at fleeing, you can turn a retreat into an offensive.
The enemies of Democracy are
However, this train probably doesn't do a 1/4 mile in 4.4 seconds. Indeed - not from a standing start. That's 3.3Gs, and the customers might spill their wine. When it gets up to speed it covers a mile in about 10 seconds.
WTF ? Insightful ??
The reality is that the french state budget dispatch for transport is something like 80 % road, 12 % rail.
aurelien
Of course then there's harder to quantify stuff like how the jet exhaust is being injected much higher in the atmosphere, and other factors like how much pollution per gallon does the jet emit compared to a car, but I think your basic statement is way off. Plus the "impact of building and maintaining the roads" is no small thing either.
Still trying to think of a clever sig...
Probably less than roads - railway tracks need far less materials than a high speed road - a high speed line can be made up of one track each way. A high speed road tends to be six lanes wide plus a shoulder. These trains are also effectively nuclear trains - 80% of France's electricity is from nuclear power, so very little noxious gas per passenger mile. (Or kilometer, given that it's France).
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How many people have been to the moon? Fewer than a dozen?. Anyone can ride a fast train in France. Who's wasting money?
I'll leave the 'blasting money into space' retort for someone else...I'm partial to the space program even though the ISS is the Ford Pinto of space projects...
However, a good high speed train would be great down here. LA to bay area...to Vegas... Holy crap, LA - Vegas train like that? Would pay for itself in probably 2 years. More practical than a plane, and more comfortable than a bus, and hella safer than dealing with the nutters on I-15.
Much more useful to have something like that in the US than another Hummer model, at the very least.
And I don't think the financial situation in the US as a nation is on solid enough ground that you can infer to it as better, even to France, but that's just an opinion.
Our rail system is a joke. Worse than a joke. It's not notable enough to use as a punchline.
The plural of the English word "metropolis" is, indeed, "metropolises." If you want to be pretentious, the Latin plural is "metropoles," and the ancient Greek plural is "metropoleis." "Metropoli" is only used by idiots who don't know Latin but like to pretend they do, and "metropolii" is right out.
...the US put men on the Moon and developed the Shuttle. The French have fast trains. Whoopee Dooo.Yes the French have fast trains. They run almost everywhere. Not only are they fast, they are clean, quiet, comfortable, reasonably priced, on time, and have excellent beverage service. This includes all of the SNCF, not just the TGV. An added benefit is that the French are extremely polite about cell phone usage on the trains.
I am certain far more Americans have ridden on French trains than have ever ridden on Apollo or the Shuttle, and probably fewer have been killed.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The TGV isn't a commuter train. It's point-to-point transportation. We don't really have anything that's quite its equivalent here in the U.S. (anymore -- we did, once, back in the days of effective passenger rail and high-speed inter-urbans) because Amtrak is so fucked up. But you wouldn't be using this to get in and out of the city center to the 'burbs every day; you'd go into the city to get on one, to go to another city.
The infrastructure you'd need around a major intercity train station in the U.S. would be basically the same stuff you need around an airport; lots and lots of parking for people to leave their cars, access to local transportation, etc. The advantage of trains over planes, however, is that you can put the stations right downtown, hopefully maximizing the number of people who can get there without driving, by using existing public transportation, and also minimizing travel time for people who want to get to the city center as a destination.
About the only place in the U.S. where you can approximate this right now, is in the Northeast Corridor, going from say Washington, DC to New York. If you want to fly, you have to get from downtown DC out to one of the airports: if you're lucky, Reagan (practically downtown), if you're unlucky or flying on a discount airline, Dulles or BWI. Then you have to go through the usual security checkpoint rectal-probery, find the gate, board the plane, fly, get off the plane, find your luggage, and get to downtown NYC from JFK or LaGuardia. Total PITA. Amtrak, when it's not running late (granted, almost never), lets you walk into Union Station in downtown DC, walk onto the train, sit down for a few hours, and walk off at Penn Station. Platform to platform, the Acela is about three hours, and it's slower than molasses compared to the European trains.
Now, really the only reason that the Acela is borderline competitive, is because the airlines and the FAA seem to be trying as hard as possible to make the flying experience like getting in a boxcar bound for Auschwicz (but without the efficiency, and probably more lost luggage). If you got rid of all the security checkpoints and just compare travel time, the Acela barely scrapes 100MPH on most days (which is actually slower than the big 8'-driver steam passenger locomotives of a generation ago were capable of), so a jet going 400-500 MPH is obviously going to be faster. But if you can push the train up to 300+MPH, and realize that the airplane is always going to have more "overhead time" because of the distance you have to put airports from cities (to keep them from running into the buildings, noise, etc.), they become a lot more competitive.
Commuter trains are always going to be hobbled by low population density. However, high-speed inter-urban trains operate according to much the same business principles that airlines do. They just need to be much more careful in laying out their routes, because unlike airlines, it's tougher for them to just re-jigger flights when they're not making money. However, there are a number of routes that are probably almost guaranteed to be profitable in the U.S. if you can get the times down to within 100-150% of a plane flight: LA to San Francisco (and then SF to Seattle) is probably a good one on the West Coast, and maybe even LA to Las Vegas. The Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-DC corridor is already profitable with current technology, and would only get better. Extending it down to Atlanta would complete the "BAMA" corridor, and you could hit the high-tech areas in NC along the way, probably.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
We need an underground transport system, that works like IP packets.
You sit in a little metal pod in your house, and are accelerated into the main "backbone". Bluetooth/RFID/something that broadcasts your final destination enables the "routers" to switch your travel onto the routes that get you to where you're going.
Get your own free personal location tracker
The Trains that amtrak runs from LA to seattle average out to 30MPH. They stop at every stinking town of 500 along the tracks, and have to pull over to let any cargo train go by, since amtrak doesn't own the tracks, the cargo companies do. I would love a Train that could hit 100+MPH, and stay that fast. I hate the restrictions and burdens of flying, and gas prices are a pain in the ass.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Lovely.
The problem with passenger rail transport is it's very difficult to run it at a profit - especially if the infrastructure isn't there to begin with. Getting people out of cars and onto trains is much harder than the other way around. So it's not particularly attractive to private companies.
This is a problem in any country which has historically shied away from having the government run services.
Erm, I think you're neglecting to consider a few factors in your unsupported hunchery.
Consider the forces at work. A train has to keep itself in motion, which requires pushing air out of the way. It also has some rolling resistance.
The airplane, on the other hand, also has to keep itself in forward motion, but there's also a lot of energy being spent keeping that fucker up in the air. The shape of a plane's wings generate lift, but they do so at the cost of creating drag. Lots of drag, compared to a train. There's just no possible way that the plane is ever going to be as efficient, because not only are you moving it horizontally across the earth, you're also putting it (and holding it) some 30,000 feet off the ground. That's much more energy-intensive than overcoming the rolling resistance of a few wheels and bearings, particularly when the wheels are running on steel rail and you can optimize the hell out of the rest of the system. (As a civilization, we're pretty good at making things rotate with minimal resistance. Ironically, it's jet aircraft that have really brought the engineering of high-speed turbobearings to near-perfection.)
It would be pretty easy to run the numbers if you wanted to: just look at the fuel consumption in gallons per hour for a modern locomotive and a jet aircraft, multiply by the energy density of the fuel (aviation kerosene and diesel), and divide by the number of passengers in each. With trains that aren't in fixed trainsets, it would get a little difficult to figure out how many "passengers" to include, but you could get some ballpark numbers.
Anyway, other people have already run the numbers. Here's a comparison done by Eurostar comparing London to Paris by plane and train, in terms of CO2 emissions:
link. "The research shows that each passenger on a return flight between London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle generates 122 kilograms of CO2, compared with just 11 kilograms for a traveller on a London-Paris return journey by train."
Now, that's CO2 emissions, not energy consumption (although the two are basically directly proportional when you're getting your power via the combustion of petroleum products), and it's probably made somewhat artificially low because the French generate a lot of electricity from fission, which is CO2-neutral, but that's not enough to explain a tenfold decrease.
Physics just isn't on the side of the airplane in terms of energy efficiency. Anything that stays on the ground is going to have a huge advantage.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Don't worry; There will be a TTL of 255 which gets decremented at every hop.
Oh wait...
Easy: Toll the bloody bejeezus out of the freeways between good train routes. Truckers get a discount.
Also, are airlines really running a profit right now? Maybe Southwest, but oy...I just don't like them...
Plus I think if it was marketed properly, to the jetsetters in a local region, it could really pay off.
Who wants to spend 5 hours driving or waiting in an airport through delays and the security? Take the train. Gets you there just as fast and you won't lose your luggage, be hassled by an apathetic TSA lacky or lose your rental deposit.
Yea, I'm pipe dreaming here, but it makes logical sense...which, of course, is why it'll never happen.
I think the other issue is that competing modes of transportation get a lot of their infrastructure handed to them, basically for free or with big subsidies, by the Federal government.
If you're a bus company, you don't have to pay to use the roads, the government has already done all the hard work for you. You just drive on them. Same with over-the-road cargo trucking. This is a huge problem for freight railroads, who would otherwise beat the tar out of road trucking: except for UPS and other time-sensitive parcel-deliveries, there's really no reason to haul bulk goods by truck, when you can take the same containers even, and put them on a train and drag them around for a fraction of the fuel cost. But the freight railroads also have to pay, not only for their locomotives and rolling stock, but also for the right-of-ways, maintenance on the track, keeping them clear during the winter, etc. All the trucking industry pays for is whatever the government adds on as a tax to diesel fuel, plus their direct taxes. (And the fuel taxes don't even start to cover the budget for the Interstate system, which is hugely damaged each year by high-axle-weight vehicles like trucks.)
With aircraft, although they admittedly don't require a huge amount of infrastructure when they're in the air (and good thing, too), things like the navigational beacon systems that IFR relies on, plus the Air Traffic Control system/network, are government-run. Sure, some of it's funded with taxes, but I'll bet you it's not 100% self-funding.
I think we can go either way -- either have the government pick up the tab for maintaining the nation's rail network, and make it available to anyone who wants to use it, in the same way that the Interstate highway system and the Air Traffic Control network is, or make users of the ATC network and the Interstate highways pay for their entire budgets so that they're self-funding without any support (and have them pay back over time the cost already contributed) -- but we're only hurting ourselves with the current arrangement. Anything that encourages an inefficiency to continue is inherently bad, and we suffer as a result of it due to higher gas prices, and geopolitical conflicts that arise due to petroleum supplies.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Bullshit. There could be this exact sort of high speed rail between Boston and New York, Chicago and Detroit, and L.A. to Seattle with say 120 MPH connector trains in the flatlands for literally 1/10th the cost of Bush disastrous pointless war in Iraq. Follow the Benjamins it's all about the O I L companies in the U.S:
d _railh -Speed_Rail_Corridor_Designations_53kb.png
See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_high-spee
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Hig
Upgrading U.S. train track is 8 times cheaper than building new freeways:
http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/201
Get some fact before just regurgitating what you hear on Rush (brought to you by the Hummer H5 now including it's own entrance ladder).
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
More practical than a plane, and more comfortable than a bus
Trains such as the French TGV, the Swiss ICN, or (even better) the Japanese Shinkansen, are far (FAR) more comfortable than a plane (I am talking economy class here).
I'm wondering how long Americans will ride along on things their parents did in the last century. Are we going to be like the French a hundred years from now? Still rich, but on the larger scale irrelevent, talking about how great we were back then?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
At least someone's working on a project that's beneficial to growing metropolises (metropolii?)
France makes a train going 350mph. What does the US make as it's engineering masterpiece? The H3... This is useless for intra-city travel. The only stretches of track that are going to be capable of carrying trains like this are long ones between major cities with no intermediary stops, not to mention the amount of distance you need to get up to speed and slow down. This will be used for Paris-Marseille and nothing shorter. In most cases, these high-speed trains cannot even utilize the same track as the medium and short range trains; they have to build a completely separate infrastructure to support the TGV, ICE, or what have you. Basically, they are targeting the market space currently occupied by short distance airlines, with business travelers as their primary target audience.
That is actually a major problem across western Europe right now. Train companies are slowly abandoning medium and short range stretches in favor of the more lucrative business traveler market, and investment in the medium and short range track and trains is languishing, resulting in deteriorating quality and frequency of service. As such, people are forced from the trains to private cars, which bring all the problems of pollution and urban sprawl that we Americans know so well. Furthermore, at these speeds trains do not run much more energy efficiently than planes either.
That is what happens when you privatize things that should be public services.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Oh.. don't tease, I dream of the day when the US is as "irrelevant" as France...
Both Switzerland Germany have a very extensive rail service that makes a profit.
...
It can be done, but clearly it won't work if it's not done right.
Think about it, a train from LA to San Diego / North California, no need to stay in traffic for hours, save on gas, save on car maintenance, save on traffic accidents, save on nerves getting stretched while waiting in traffic,
It makes so much sense, what doesn't make sense is the american people's love for traffic.
OK, here are few fact about the TGV:
1) It's electric. It does not run on fuel. 76% (IIRC) of the electricity produced in France being nuclear, this did not burn fuel to produce either (although nuclear power has its drawbacks as well that I won't comment on)
2) Nobody has ever been killed in a TGV. At most a few minor injuries. The way the cars are linked on a TGV makes it pretty resistant to twisting. When the first cars come out, they can't fall on their side because the ones still on the rails hold them (at least that's what I understood). The few times such a train has derailed showed what happens: the first cars just get out of the rails.
The tracks themselves (and that's the expensive part) are a dedicated system with
- No roads crossing them (every road goes over or under the rails)
- No access (most of them have barriers around to prevent people and animals from going on the track)
- Specific limits on the bend radius
- An electronic signaling system that sends the maximum attainable speed to the train for each portion
That makes it pretty fast and secure indeed (although it has its price).
On the application to the US, you have to take certain thing into account. The longest TGV track in France must be about 500 miles (Paris to Marseille).
In the US, I'm not sure what distances would have to be spanned, but remember that it's ELECTRIC. You need to be able to line those electric cables reliably from end to end.
France does not enjoy the same kind of weather as the US. There is no hurricane and the minimum temperature is usually quite higher than in the US.
France enjoyed (and still does) a state monopoly on the rail, Just as with the Telecoms, this brought a very good infrastructure (no need to be profitable, so let's spend !), and a very shitty consumer service (you would not believe what French people put up with from the guy handling their requests...)
Getting such an infrastructure, especially in the states where it would need to be massive, would have a prohibitive cost. And getting it slowly is not really an option. You need lots of tracks to be meaningful and have a chance to become profitable.
I'm not sure it would work in the US. Then again, it might, who knows.
That's not a nick, that's my NAME.
Nice numbers... here's some others.
Florence, Italy -> Rome, Italy: 275km
Houston, TX, USA -> Austin, TX, USA: 162miles (260km)
Everybody who keeps comparing the EU to the USA and saying how cities in Europe are so much closer are only thinking about things like LA to SF, or even from either of those to New York. Nobody in Europe is going to take a train to get from Oslo to Lisboa either (well, some people do - just as some in the U.S. take roadtrips from coast to coast).
...It's not likely we'll see steel-wheel trains go faster than 350 km/h (217 mph) in the near future in commercial service.
The reason is simple: physical contact. At these very high speeds, the physical contact force between between the overhead wiring and pantographs on the train and the the steel wheels and the steel rail is ENORMOUS, requiring strong, expensive metals to keep physical wear as low as possible. Remember, the record was done on a very short train under extremely tight tolerance conditions not encountered in regular service.
Japan solved that by having multiple tiers of trains. I'm not sure what the exact terms are, but there are express trains that stop only at the point of origin and the destination, then there are semi-express trains that only stop at major interchanges, then there are standard trains which make every stop.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"probably fewer have been killed" : 0 death in 25 years because of accidents. And yes, once a TGV derailed at almost 200mph : just minor injuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Safety
AWx
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Actually, in France, there are three steps to taking a TGV:
1) You buy your ticket.
2) You get your ticket stamped (in an automatic machine).
3) You board the train.
It's that easy because some joker with a bomb in a TGV wouldn't do any more damage than, for example, some joker with a bomb in any other crowded area. In planes, it's different, because a relatively small amount of damage will cause the plane to fall from on high, killing everybody.
Also, it is generally impossible to hijack TGVs and crash them into major buildings.
Le français vous intéresse?
A dozen years ago, when the earliest french speedtrain was deployed between Paris and Lyons (some 500Km away) the french airlines that provided the equivalent transportation just had to close their slots on this destination, because they almost were just abandoned in a matter of months.
Today, even though the TGV train cannot highspeed in some areas (because its rails still have to be adapted: smoother bends etc.), a 800-km travel takes you almost the same time rail/air unless you happen to live in front of the airport.
There are not a lot of things a french can be proud of nowadays given our present government, but TGVs are one of them, all the more in the perspective of costlier fuel and pollution...
Herve S.
For a few months now, smoking is banned in most public places in France. Bars and restaurants have a grace period until 2008, when they too will not legally be able to allow smoking. Believe it or not, the French seem to be respecting the new restriction, for the most part.