Our trip to Kyoto last weekend also marked our first time on the Shinkansen (新幹線), the world's oldest and busiest high-speed rail network.
Known to foreigners as the bullet train, as of last spring the Shinkansen (literally, "new trunk line") runs all the way from Kagoshima in southern Kyushu to Hachinohe, near the northern tip of Honshu. It's hands down the most convenient way to get between cities on any given line: door-to-door, it beats most flights, and the stations are a lot closer to town. As for driving, it's not even close: 8.5 hours on the road, versus less than 3 on the train, and not a whole lot of savings after you pay those astronomical Japanese highway tolls.
Plus, it's an awesome machine.
Check out these videos of how swift and smooth they are pulling in and out of the station. (Remember, e-mail subscribers - for videos, you need to click through to the blog.)
Even cooler? The fact that the Shinkansen doesn't depend on any single technology. In other words, it's not one super-awesome feat of engineering, it's dozens, plus a few feats of logistics, to boot. The result is that you can walk into any major train station on one of the Shinkansen lines, buy a ticket, board a train within about 10 minutes, and be at your destination in a few hours. Isn't the future grand?
Note: the Shinkansen ticketing system is sadly much less futuristic. Long story short, I had two $250 pieces of paper in my pocket for the better part of a week. Tickets like that should be at least a little more secure than cash!
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