The Bullet Train

Early on the morning of 1 October 1964, a long white and blue train slid out of Tokyo Station and began to gather speed.

It had a rounded nose, like the front of an aeroplane. Within minutes it was moving faster than any train in regular service anywhere in the world. Its top speed was 210 kilometres an hour.

The new line ran to Osaka, more than 500 kilometres away. The journey that had taken six and a half hours on the fastest old express now took four. A year later, it took just over three.

Japan called it the Shinkansen, the "new trunk line". The rest of the world soon called it the bullet train.

A crowded country

Less than twenty years earlier, at the end of the Second World War, much of Japan had been in ruins. By the 1950s the country was rebuilding fast. Factories, offices and homes were filling the narrow strip of coast between Tokyo and Osaka, and the old railway between them, the Tokaido line, was one of the busiest in the world.

It could not carry any more. Trains ran nose to tail. Freight and passengers waited.

Most experts in the world believed that the future belonged to cars, motorways and aeroplanes. In America and Europe, railways were in decline. Building a costly new railway seemed to many people like a step backwards.

The old man and the engineer

In 1955, Shinji Sogo became president of Japanese National Railways. He was already 71 years old. He had spent his life around railways, and he was convinced that a completely new line was the answer: a fast, straight, wide-gauge railway built only for passenger trains, with no level crossings at all.

To build it, Sogo needed the best engineer he could find. He chose Hideo Shima, who had designed steam locomotives and had left the railway some years before. Shima's father had also been a railway engineer, who had argued decades earlier for wider tracks in Japan. Sogo persuaded Shima to come back as chief engineer.

In 1957, researchers at the railway's own institute gave a public lecture in Tokyo. They explained that, with the right technology, a train could travel between Tokyo and Osaka in about three hours. The hall was full. The idea caught the public's imagination.

Solving a hundred problems

Going so fast on rails raised problems no one had solved before.

At 200 kilometres an hour, a driver cannot read signals beside the track, so the signals were placed inside the driver's cab, and the train could slow itself down automatically. The whole line was controlled from one central room in Tokyo. Instead of one heavy locomotive pulling the coaches, small electric motors were spread along the train, making it lighter on the track. The rails were welded into long, smooth lengths.

Some of the engineers who worked on the shape of the train and on how to stop it shaking had designed aircraft during the war. Now they turned their skills to peaceful work. On a test track in 1963, a trial train went faster than 250 kilometres an hour.

To pay for it, Japan borrowed 80 million dollars from the World Bank in 1961. The loan was small compared with the full cost, but it was a sign that the world was taking the project seriously.

The price of a dream

The project cost far more than first planned, almost twice as much in the end. Many historians believe Sogo had given a low estimate on purpose at the start, so that the government would agree to begin. When the true cost became clear, there was an outcry.

In 1963, Sogo took responsibility and left his post. Hideo Shima left soon after. Neither of them was among the guests of honour when the line opened the following year, nine days before the Tokyo Olympic Games began.

Yet everyone knew whose dream it was.

A train for ordinary days

The Shinkansen changed daily life in ways that reached far beyond engineers and ministers.

A business trip from Tokyo to Osaka could now be done in a day, there and back. Families could visit grandparents in another city at the weekend. Students could go home for the holidays easily. Towns along the line grew and prospered. In time, Shinkansen lines spread across much of Japan.

The trains became famous for two things. They run on time, with average delays measured in seconds rather than minutes. And in all the decades since 1964, it is widely reported that no passenger has been killed in a derailment or collision on the Shinkansen.

The bullet train also changed minds abroad. Railways were not finished after all. France, Spain, China and many other countries went on to build their own high-speed lines.

Shinji Sogo died in 1981. Hideo Shima went on to lead Japan's national space development agency. Both are remembered today as the fathers of the Shinkansen.

Want to read more?

Christopher P. Hood's Shinkansen: From Bullet Train to Symbol of Modern Japan tells the full story of how the line was built and what it came to mean to the Japanese people. Roderick A. Smith's article in The Journal of Transport History explains how it inspired high-speed rail around the world.