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World's Fastest Trains From the Age of Steam to the TGV By Geoffrey Freeman
The World’s Fastest Trains From the Age of Steam to the TGV By Geoffrey Freeman Allen
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
SECOND EDITION Copyright 1978, 1992.
192 pages.
Table Of Contents
Introduction 6
1. Steam's quest for the hundred 7
2. The Golden Age of steam speed 14
3. Diesels and electrics show their paces 37
4. The French point the post-war way 54
5. Japan's 'Bullet Trains' — The Shinkansen 66
6. Britain's InterCity model for Europe 81
7. From IC to ICE in Germany 102
8. Italy's chequered high-speed story 120
9. Pain, progress and promise in North America 136
10. The triumphs of France's TGV 151
11. Spain joins the high-speed club 172
12. Scandinavia, the Alps and the Far East 179
13. MagLev hunts for buyers 185
Index 189
The first edition of this book was written with the construction of France's first high-speed line, the TGV-PSE, still two years from completion. Given the decades of methodical research and development which the French had previously dedicated to perfecting the synergy of high-speed traction, vehicles and infrastructure, the immediate technical fulfilment of the first TGV was predictable. Less foreseeable was its extraordinary commercial success. Or, largely because of that, completion by the end of 1990 of a second TGV (operating, moreover, at 300 kmph, not the 250 kmph which I then took to be the realistic speed ceiling for the immediate future); and a start on three more TGV routes. Least of all did I anticipate that within a dozen years of the first edition's publication the world wheel-on-rail speed record would be thrust beyond 300 mph and 500 kmph by a specially-prepared TGV unit.
France has a claim to top billing in the drama of rail speed advance during the 1980s. But there were other stars, plus a considerable supporting cast, few of which had the equipment or performance to warrant attention in the first edition. In this edition, generally speaking, I have set current or shortly anticipated regular operation at 125 mph or 200 kmph as the minimum to justify a latter-day development's discussion. Even so, the amount of new text required - as well as revision of the original - has been so considerable that some of the first edition's descriptions of early rail speed exploits have had to be curtailed to keep the book within manageable proportions. Some of the original illustration, too, has had to make way for the extensive photographic coverage of 1980s innovation. But none of the milestones in rail speed history recorded in the first edition are omitted.
This is not, as I stressed in the first edition, a book for students of engineering. It deals only in technicalities that are basic to a layman's understanding of how the steady advance of day-to-day passenger train speed has been achieved. It is, I hope, not only a compact 20th-century history of rail speed, but also a narrative that brings to life the chronicle's more venturesome exploits.
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