TRANSFORMATIONAL TRANSPORT
TTwo hours from Tokyo’s blinking neon center, the sleek white train shoots out of a mountain tunnel at nearly 311 mph — levitating about four inches above its guideway as it glides past the surrounding rice fields.
The train’s long aerodynamic nose and bold blue streaks, a contrast against the forested slopes, make it seem unreal, like a prop from a space film repurposed as a rural amusement ride. But it is in fact the world’s fastest train, what Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called “the crystallization of our most advanced technologies.”
The magnetic levitation, or “maglev,” train is so fast it draws exclamations from schoolchildren and retirees at a nearby exhibition center, who bemoan the blurriness of their photos. A few hundred feet down the mountain, it shakes the cinderblock walls of 91-year-old Moriyoshi Suzuki’s tidy family home. On board, where the liftoff feels like that of a jet taking wing, riders gape at a speedometer as the train tears through the region’s jagged topography.
“It was very comfortable,” said Megumi Kawamura, who won online lottery tickets to ride the 27-mile exhibition line with her husband, Kazuki, and their 3-year-old son.
“It was a lot faster than I imagined,” her husband said, drawing grins from officials with the Central Japan Railway Co., or JR Central, which developed the train.
The crowd-pleasing demonstration line was designed to test the technology, but also to deliver a message. The point, says Torkel Patterson, a former U.S. naval officer who serves on the railroad’s board of directors, “is that this is ready for prime time. It’s not just some technology that ‘could be’ someday.”
Indeed, after 50 years and billions of dollars in Japanese research and development, JR Central says its maglev train is ready for its big rollout — and not just in Japan, where the company has already begun an $80 billion project to extend the See MAGLEV, page 16