Japan unveiled its latest bullet train, the Hokuriku Shinkansen, on Saturday (March 14) to run on a newly extended line to link one of the last remaining unconnected areas on the mainland to Tokyo.
The newly extended line to the old castle town of Kanazawa will run the new E7 or W7 train.
The train also known as “Kagayaki” or brightness in Japanese takes 2 hours and 28 minutes to travel from Tokyo to Kanazawa.
President of East Japan Railways, Testsuro Tomita, hoped the new link would improve the local economies.
“Whether it’s for business or tourism we hope to create a new type of mindset and improve the areas involved. For those areas in the countryside, we hope to improve their economies and made them more active. So for all these problems that Japan has, we hope to help solve them. We hope to be the trigger,” Tomita said.
The new trains will run at a top speed of 260 kilometers per hour (162 miles per hour).
The last extension of the Japanese bullet train line, running the Hayabusa train, was at the beginning of March 2011, only 5 days before the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster struck.
The two trains still fall short of China’s Harmony Express, a cross-continental rapid transit train known to travel at a maximum of 350 kilometer per hour (218 miles per hour).
Japan’s very first high-speed train went into operation on October 1, 1964 and for nearly two decades was the fastest passenger train in the world. It also remains one of the safest.
Over its 49-year history, the Shinkansen, as it is known in Japanese, has not had a single accident which resulted in any deaths, despite frequent travel through the country’s many earthquakes and typhoons, government data has showed.
(Reuters)
