Across the world, high-speed trains zip from city to city, sometimes topping 250 miles per hour before dropping off hundreds of passengers right in a city’s downtown. However, in the U.S., that vision of efficient, fast, environmentally friendly travel remains a dream.
Japan built high speed trains more than 50 years ago, an engineering marvel then and now. Its bullet trains (a term coined by the Japanese) connect the country’s megalopolises with eye-popping levels of efficiency—the average delay is less than a minute. China has 23,500 miles of high-speed tracks traversing its countryside, linking its coastal megacities like Shanghai and Shenzhen to each other and to its vast interior. European rail connects the continent so well it serves both the backpacking crowd and executives hurrying from one country’s financial capital to another on trains like the London-Paris Eurostar.
