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Fastest Trains in the World by G Freeman Allen Hard Cover 1978 160 pages
The Fastest Trains in the World by G Freeman Allen Hard Cover 1978 160 pages
This book is deliberately titled. It is about the 'Fastest Trains' rather than the 'Fastest Railways' because, for me, a train in the world of transport has only one connotation. I concede that the term 'railway' might be stretched to cover any form of track to guide vehicles, but a 'train' is a steel wheeled vehicle or vehicles on steel rails and nothing else. So this is a book about proper trains. It has nothing to do with air-cushions, Maglev, or any other of the guided transport exotica for which so much has been promised in recent years, so little as yet realised.
Nor is it a book for the dedicated engineering student. I have dealt only in such basic technical detail as seems essential to an understanding of the practical and economic barriers to rapid advance of everyday inter-city speed on rails.
Practical social value apart, speed on rail has fascinated more people of all ages, I fancy, than the pace of any public transport. Is even Concorde as riveting as a hundred-mile an-hour train? From a starting-point around 1900, when railways were first reaching for the 'ton', I have tried to relive all the nail-biting excitements in assembling a narrative of the major high-speed exploits of the past around the world. That leavens, I hope, the main substance of the book, which aims to enlighten on the countless factors with which railway managements and engineers must reckon before they can significantly accelerate today's inter-city trains. It has been no easier to translate the remarkable French test exploits at 200mph of 1955 into everyday passenger performance at tolerable cost than to transmute supersonic military aircraft design into a viable passenger jetliner format. Researching this book, I have been forcibly reminded of the way so many euphoric speed forecasts of the late 1960s and early 1970s have collapsed under fuller appreciation of all the problems. In those days there was scarcely a major railway in the West which wasn't confident of running 150mph or 250kmph trains before the decade was out. (And by the 1980s, of course, we were sure to be flitting about the countryside at 300mph or 500kmph in tracked hovercraft. Maglev cars or whatever.) By the late 1970s, in contrast, only the French sound certain of running 150mph (250kmph) trains intensively before the 1980s recede.
I should add that, so far as future high-speed prospects are concerned, I have dealt only with trains and equipment that have already had their potential publicly proved at the time of writing. Thus, for instance, I have not felt able to discuss the Russian prototype equipment - the Riga-built ER200 electric multiple-unit and Czech-built CH200 electric locomotive prototype to work with Russian R'I'200 'Troika' coaches- which in early 1978 were starting trials with a view to 125mph (200kmph) operation on the Moscow-Leningrad line.
Finally, my warm thanks to the many agencies and individuals around the high-speed railway world who have helped gild the text with illustrations. Each is appropriately credited on the pages concerned.
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