Today in History: Japanese Shinkansen ("bullet trains") began their high-speed rail service from Tokyo to Osaka on this day in 1964. The maximum operating speed is 320 km/h (200 mph) (on a 387.5 km section of the Tohoku Shinkansen). Test runs have reached 443 km/h (275 mph) for conventional rail in 1996, and up to a world record 603 km/h (375 mph) for SCMaglev trains in April 2015.
Over the Shinkansen's 50-plus-year history, carrying over 10 billion passengers, there has been not a single passenger fatality or injury due to train accidents, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons.
The word Shinkansen in Japanese means 'new trunk line' or 'new main line', but this word is used to describe both the railway lines the trains run on and the trains themselves. Japan was the first country to build dedicated railway lines for high-speed travel.
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