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The train among the most revolutionary of all human inventions. The story of the train is the story of increasing trade, of empire, of freedom and progress. This was a gamecher, a hugely transformative technology. Its invention transforms the world forever. where we go, who we meet, even how we think. It was absolutely groundbreaking. From the golden age of steam to the superfast trains of today, this is the story of the trains that changed the world.
June 2017, China unveils the Fushinghao high-speed train. It fires passengers between Shanghai and Beijing at 217 mph, the world's fastest rail line. This has been China's opportunity to say that we can be a world leader in highspeed railways and that we could also help other countries in developing their railways too. China's embrace of capitalist free markets has infused its people with boundless energy. An echo of the pioneering dynamism behind the invention of the first trains in industrial Britain. China has the biggest highspeed rail network in the world and their continued development is seen by the Chinese as essential.
China has more highspeed railway lines than the rest of the world put together. And by 2025, they're going to have enough to go right the way around the planet. But it's not just the quantity of railway track that counts. It's how quickly you can get round it. Speeding up train services has always been the aim of the railway companies. They know that for every 5 minutes they can save on a journey, they are more competitive. Speed isn't just exciting. It saves time. It makes human interaction easier. It opens new horizons for more people. Highspeed travel brings place together.
It's shunk the world. And for certain journeys, if you can make them fast enough, trains will always beat cars and planes. This is one of the beauties of highspeed rail is that it's that much easier to just move around. We don't have seat belts on trains. There's no turbulence to worry about, anything like that. With highspeed rail, you can do a journey of 300 m in around 2 and 1/2 hours, and you're never going to be able to check in and out of an airport and do the flight in between in that time. So, it's really always been a race to speed up rail services. Today's race for speed has its roots in the steam age. In 1938, the magnificent Malard shot down the east coast mainline at 126 mph.
It was an astonishing engineering achievement, but it was the fastest a steam train would ever travel. Steam locomotives are heavy and engineers could extract only so much energy from coal. The physics of steam engines had reached its limits. A new form of power was needed. Clean, convenient, plentiful. The story of today's high-speed trains starts with the harnessing of electrical energy. Electricity has revolutionized energy supply. By the end of the 19th century, Thomas Edison is marketing his new light bulbs.
Soon, electric trams will begin to appear and within a few years will come electric trains. Electric locomotives are a revolution in train design. They operate in a completely different way from either diesel or like this one, steam locomotives. These two take with them their own fuel and make their own power. Whereas an electric locomotive gets its power from example from an overhead line. Imagine being able to do away with the firebox, the boiler, the fuel, the water. It makes the whole locomotive lighter. If it's lighter, it can go faster. There's no question design is revolutionized by electricity.
The world's first high-speed electric train is produced by a consortium of German companies in 1903. AEG and Seammens, the two big electrical German manufacturers, produced two almost identical high-speed electrical rail cars. These were the concept cars of their day, designed to prove a point rather than for any practical purpose. That point was speed. This is 1903. This is a time when women are still wearing long skirts, when houses are lit by oil lamps, when people are moving around towns and cities with horses and carts. But this train is doing 130 mph.
The AEG rail car is ahead of its time. In Germany, the first big coal fired electricity generator has only just been built. There's not enough electricity in the country to power a rail network. And no country yet has a national grid. Electronic high-speed locomotion will have to wait. A highspeed electric railway requires massive infrastructure investment. You need to have power stations to power those railway trains. And to connect the power stations to those trains, you've got to have wires, cables, cinery masks.
It's very expensive. It's not until the 1930s that electricity grids have spread across Europe and North America. Only then do electric trains start to look like a realistic alternative to steam. They're especially attractive in countries with very little coal. One of these is Mussolini's Italy, which is forced to import its coal from countries like Britain and Germany. Italy had very little coal of its own. didn't have mines and it was subject to embargos from Britain. They wanted their own electric industry. They wanted their trains to run on electricity, not on coal. So in the 1930s, Italy's state railway
electrifies the line from Milan to Naples. And in 1936, the Italian company Brada builds the world's first practical high-speed electric train. Unlike the AEG rail car, the Electro Trainoro Rapido or ETR is a proper working passenger train. It's one of the main exhibits in the 1939 New York World's Fair and it causes a sensation. It is and looks like a new kind of train for a new modern age. Gone are the funnels and pipes and protrances of a steam train. The lines are straight and simple.
Mussolini, he loved his ETR trains. Beautifully sleek, stunningly engineered. I mean, really beautifully engineered and terribly, terribly fast. That summer, Italian engineers set out to break the world speed record for a commercial passenger train. A special trip was put on for the press where a train ran from Florence uh through to Milan and it did so at an average speed of 102 mph. The press were on board. They loved it. They were impressed. On the 20th of July 1939, the ETR reaches a top speed of 126 mph. And unlike Malard, it does it while pulling passengers.
Italian companies might have gone on to further develop high-speed train transport, but the fascists Mussolini and Adolf Hitler have other plans. World War II is a blow to train innovation. The combatants force their best engineers to work on guns and tanks and warplanes. This is true in the Pacific, where Japanese engineers at Mitsubishi are forced to use their skills to build warplanes like the Zero, one of the great fighter planes of the Second World War.
Engineer Teddano Miki designs a rocket powered human guided kamicazi attack aircraft, the so-called Cherry Blossom. They had one primary role to be flown, but on a one-way journey. They were not going to be coming back. The nose is just one big torpedo filled with high explosives. Two terrible instruments of war. And yet, the Zero and the Cherry Blossom feature design innovations which will go on after the war to inspire an extraordinary new, incredibly fast kind of locomotive, the Bullet Train, August 1945. By refusing to surrender, Japan's military rulers ensure that the country suffers devastation in the later stages of the war. There's a shortage of food.
A lot of factories have been bombed. The economy is really on its knees. To recover from such a trauma will surely take decades. But under pressure from America, a new democratic constitution is introduced and the Japanese vote to slash taxes. For decades after World War II, Japan has among the lowest taxes by far in the industrial world. The result is what foreigners called an economic miracle. In just 15 years, Japanese output increases four-fold. A new Japan rises from the ashes. To serve it, a new transport system is needed. Their commercial lines quickly filled up in the years after the war.
The 320 mi railway between Japan's two biggest cities is struggling. This particular stretch between Tokyo and Osaka is just 3% of the country's railway, but it's been forced to carry a quarter of the nation's rail traffic. It's chaos. In April 1959, work begins on what will become the world's first railway line dedicated to high-speed travel, the Shinkansen. It's a technological breakthrough. The rails are welded together to create as smooth a join as possible. There will be no level crossings, no sharp curves, no steep gradients.
There was no risk of being delayed by a slow running goods train or a suburban train. This was a new railway with a new way of operating and a new thinking behind it. They give it the nickname Dangania which translated into English is bullet train. High speed presents a series of new problems for train designers. When developing the bullet train, one of the things they realized they need to look at very seriously is what happens if a bird hits the train. So they test this by taking dead birds and stuffing them to exactly the right weight and then firing them at the windscreen. And through that process, they work out
exactly how thick the glass needs to be. Birds aren't the only problem. A superfast train faces similar engineering challenges to aircraft. Wind resistance and vibration. With a train, this could lead to a catastrophic derailment. When a train moves very fast, its wheels will vibrate. They will oscillate. Um, and eventually they will both rise off the rail, derailing the train. So it's essential the rail stays in firm contact with the wheel. Newspapers had apparently already written the article saying Shinkansen crashes and all that had to be done was just slot in the date, the time, number of people on board, things like this. That was the level of concern about it.
To find a solution, Japanese engineer Tadashi Matsadira goes back to his designs from the Second World War. It was experienced with the famous Mitsubishi Zero fighter which initially will break up because of certain vibrations caused by the propeller and that experience was used in the Shinkansen bullet trains. He comes up with a suspension system that will work to dampen the vibrations at the really high speeds of the bullet train. Rather than train just almost sitting directly on top of the wheels, you've now got like more of a suspension system involved where you've got that very tough demands being placed on the wheels. This dampening system just ensures that the vibration doesn't continue right the way through to the train.
But to travel at high speed, a train also needs to slip easily through the air. The solution comes from Tadano Mickey, the engineer behind the cherry blossom kamicazi rocket bomb, which was the sci-fi looking scourge of American warships in the Pacific. So it led to a very streamlined, very efficient design. And this aerodynamic influence would have been still in the mind of Mickey. Mickey works round the clock testing clay models shaped like missiles. Mickey said, "It's not just about the speed. It has to look right. It has to look beautiful."
The style, the design of the Shinkansen was completely iconic. Shinkansen sort of took this to the next level as it were. The original Shinkansen bullet trains were extremely beautiful. When you see pictures of films of them, the famous ones of course streaking past Mount Fuji, the ancient Japanese world and this ultra modern world seem to fit together. I mean, these are like samurai warriors on rails. On October the 1st, 1964, the bullet train makes its inaugural run. The whole of this test run was shown live on Japanese TV. So there's a massive buildup in excitement about this happening.
Everybody's watching it on TV. It's just before the Olympics. This is Japan's reputation at stake internationally. Is it really going to be fast? There's something about it which is different. It's iconic, but is it actually a fast design? I um interviewed one professor who was on the Shinkansen. His comment to me was that soon after they left Tokyo Station, the speed suddenly started jumping up and he immediately he was looking around for a seat belt. On test runs, this superfast bullet train reaches 130 mph. Soon, the Hikari Super Express Shinkansen connects the capital Tokyo with the industrial powerhouse of Asaka in just 4 hours.
There's a lot of people wanting to get between these two cities for business. The distance is around about 500 km. Um, so it's not an insignificant distance. perfect distance for air travel, but also it should be a good distance for railways if you can get the trains going fast enough and they can. Within 3 months of opening, a staggering 11 million people have traveled on the Shinkansen. This is not an elite service. The Shinkansen lets anyone travel long distances at speed. In the first 3 years, it carries over 100 million passengers.
Yes, it becomes a world record breaker, the world's fastest train, but it's been used by everybody. It's not just for the super rich. Anybody can take a Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osakura and the intervening stations. It's a train for everybody. And the Japanese certainly took them to their hearts and so much so that the bullet trains during rush hours run like tube trains. The frequency is simply hard to believe. You can stand in the main station in Tokyo. If you miss one bullet train, the next one comes 3 minutes later. Very quickly it became profitable, highly used and so it became synonymous with Japan being successful.
It was in a way that the beginning of Japan's technological revolution and the beginning of Japan restoring confidence in itself. It also helps restore the image of Japan in the eyes of the world. It's an extraordinary PR coup for Japan whose reputation after the Second World War had never really come back again. And yet with the bullet train, everybody's excited by Japanese technology. Suddenly, and it really was suddenly, people around the world wanted Japanese motorbikes, radios, transistors, and it was the bullet train that became the great symbol of Japanese technological and social advancement.
Other countries start to say, well, actually, yes, we need the railways. The railways have a role to play. And they look to learn from the Japanese experience in terms of developing a high-speed railway network. But Japan is not the only high-speed pioneer in the postwar years. While Britain's nationalized railways cough and splutter, and America concentrates on profitable freight, it is France that takes up the challenge of superfast rail travel. Since the days of steam, the French have prided themselves on having the fastest trains in the world. In the post-war years, as the Japanese developed the bullet train, the French respond to the challenge with high-speed passenger trains of their own.
This French electric locomotive drawing three streamline coaches recently made an attempt on the world's rail speed record. The run took place near Bordeaux. The train was soon traveling at over 150 mph, 160, 180. The French race to design a train that will rival the success achieved by the Japanese Shinkansen. The French can see the impact that highspeed train travel is having in Japan and they want a piece of that action. They know that anything done at high speed that's cutting edge is going to make them look good.
Well, before the launch of the bullet train, French designers are working towards a modern electric rail network running futuristic trains. Then aware that Trains of the Future ought to be faster, the French National Railway starts a series of tests to see how fast they could go. And boy, it's up staggeringly fast. In 1955, French electric trains are set to break the 200 mph barrier. The BB94 is the first to make the attempt. Was it hairy? Yes, of course it was. 205 mph using 1950s technology on rails was really going for it. It's dangerous. You're on the edge of things. The wheels are thrashing from side to side as the train reaches 205 mph. It looks like it will derail. But the train stabilizes and smashes the record.
Speed on the track and speed in setting about streamlining its rail system. That's been France's record since the war. For France, the age of steam is over. But despite remarkable successes with their electric locomotives, French designers now try something different. Something new and exciting appeared on the horizon in France the 1960s. Everyone's exploring new ways to move people around faster and more effectively. In fact, the train that French innovators are experimenting with will not even run on rails. Now, nearing the final stages of its development, the French Aerot train will be a considerable boon to intercity commuters when it's brought into service. In 1965, French engineer Jean Berta
develops a train that can hover above the tracks. The Aotra was this remarkable single car floating train that ran on a concrete track across the French countryside and it sped across floating on a cushion of air. It ran on an experimental test track and it went through various phases and it changed its shape. It morphed as it developed. It started off as a train that looked like something from Buck Rogers and something much sleeker. Trains that run along tracks encounter resistance as the wheels meet the lines, but the Aerot train rides above the tracks. The only physical force that will slow it down is air pressure.
Modern interior decor give passengers much the same feeling as riding in a jet aircraft. Jean Berta isn't the only Maverick inventor toying with alternatives to electric trains. The need for speed is almost an innate human desire. There are always going to be people who will risk their lives for speed, creating some of these bizarre, bonkers contraptions. But that's because many people want to take risks to be the first, to be the best, and to be the fastest. In Butler, Indiana, a former American military pilot, Don Wetszel, comes up with an eccentric new high-speed train.
Don Bretzel was a railroad engineer for the New York Central Railroad and it was his idea to have a highspeed train powered not by electric power, not by steam, but by jet. In 1966, Dawn and his colleagues attached two jet bomber engines to the roof of a Bud rail car and experimented with it. With Dawn at the helm, the M497 is taken for a run. Many of the neighbors thought that a fighter was coming down the tracks at low level. They didn't realize it was a train. We made uh four runs and I can't uh tell you exactly which one we did which because we some were at 120, some were at 140 and then of course the hot run was at 180.
The M497 reaches a top speed of 183 mph, an American rail speed record that still stands today. But this is an idea that's going nowhere. Of course, jet engines are not perhaps practical when you're trying to go along past station platforms underneath bridges. You need to get to the end of railway line and you have to go backwards. The M497 is also held back by the limitations of its tracks. Something which the French a train doesn't have to worry about. So revolutionary is its design that in 1967 an aerot train reaches the speed of mph. But the aer train falls foul of France's state monopoly. Its failure was a political one. The government pulled the funding from it when it realized quite quickly that actually this machine was competing
against the government's own program. The French government's preferred option is an intercity highspeed rail service called TGV or TR a grand vitess. It is inspired by the success of Japan's Shinkansen but faces a different set of obstacles. Much of the French railway system had been built at great expense after the war, but the lines weren't up to the standards needed for Japanese-style bullet trains. The Shinkansen you have to appreciate as a whole system. It's not just the train, it's the railway line, it's the signaling system, it's the whole package.
The TGV use a completely different concept. They're saying, "Let's have a train which can go on ordinary railways, but also let's build higher speed railways, specially designed railways, so that when it's on those stretches, the train can go faster." Which is why if you travel on the TGV, you'll notice sometimes it just goes onto just simple normal commuter lines, particularly in big cities where there's not the space necessary to build a new dedicated line. In April 1972, the French tested train designed to reach astonishing speeds on new high-speed stretches of line using engines that are more at home in the skies.
This is the TGV1. Tea had these two helicopter style gas turbines built inside it. This is massively overpowered in this one machine. They then powered these two electrical motors mounted directly on the body that then powered those axles underneath. The whole thing was one massive power unit. It was France's way of going super high speed. The TGV00001 makes over 5,000 test runs. It hits 198 mph, a world speed record for a non-electric train. The French now have a high-speed train that might have become the envy of the world. But there's a problem, and it's sparked by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
The timing of TGV1 absolutely couldn't be worse. It coincides with the Middle Eastern oil embargo, which means the price of oil quadruples in 6 months. And that's the moment when TGV1 enters the stage. Unfortunately, the early 1970s was not a time where there was plentiful oil supply and TJ was a massive gas guzzler. It was a bit of a dead end at that point. Undaunted, French engineers reinvent the TGV as an electric train. In February 1981, the new electric TGV breaks the world speed record for a train on rails reaching 236 mph, more than 360 kmh on the French dial.
It's France that's really starting to push in terms of trying to get faster trains and getting sort of the records for the fastest train on conventional railway lines. The TGV let France regain its national pride in rail. This massive investment by the government in a highspeed rail network was you know the envy of the world and still is today in many ways and has actually become the blueprint for electrically powered high-speed lines. As more stretches of fast track are added to the French rail network, the TGV picks up speed.
The TGV has huge advantages over the Shinkansen in certain areas. The biggest single advantage you got is that it can be put onto existing railway lines. So in terms of gradually improving a country's railway lines, you can effectively roll it out bit by bit as you improve aspects of the railway line. Today, it's possible to travel the length of France, 500 m from Paris to Marseilles in just 3 hours. It's one of the fastest, furthest non-stop rail journeys in the world. They have shown that they can completely revolutionize rail traffic.
It connected the country. Suddenly, what was the point of flying from Paris to Leon or Paris to Marseilles when you could get on a train? French success inspires other nations to embark on the high-speed journey. In Italy, Bombaders Zapiro Fretier Rosa in Britain HS1. And in Germany, the ice train. Yet at the start of the millennium, the Shinkansen remains the fastest kid on the block. We talk about highspeed railways. You've got almost like prize boxing fighters going out to try and knock the other one out and say we're
best at certain things. In reality, it's a bit like comparing apples and pears. Yes, they're all high-speed trains. They're of a sort, but they have their own particular strengths and weaknesses. And in the end, it's down to individual countries to think about which one actually is a slightly better fit for our own needs. Commercial railways in countries like America are driven by profit, but French state railways are among the most subsidized in the world and thereafter prestige. As they enter the 21st century, French railways continue to press for better, faster TGVs. In 2007, their V150 TGV attempts a record on live TV and breaks it. An incredible 357 m, 575 km an hour.
The TGV was exciting. It made France look like a country going forwards. It enabled people to travel across the country fast before. Something completely and completely different to anything that people could have possibly imagined back in the 1850s when those first trains crawled along at 20 mph. The TGV was even called the train that saved France's railways. The TGV became a symbol of lack technocracy, the belief that France wasn't some rundown country after the Second World War that had nothing to offer the world. Far from it, it's technology in aviation, engineering, cars, architecture, bridge building was superb and always have been. But TTV brought this together and it became this beautiful symbol of France on the move.
But the dynamism of French railways would turn out to be illusory. France's state railway is weighed down with debt and struggling to be profitable. and the TGV trains are now under threat. It is not in old Europe, but in the dynamic East that the future of high-speed travel appears to be taking shape. France holds the record for the world's fastest passenger train, but there are others with eyes on the prize. As life speeds up and as the world around us speeds up and as aircraft take over, trains have to go faster. More than 50 years ago, Japan transformed high-speed rail by running their revolutionary bullet train.
Now, their engineers want the world to take notice again. Japan saying, "We can go faster. We need to go faster. We could connect Tokyo to Osaka not in 2 and 1/4 hours, but in 1 hour." In 2012, Japanese designers create a new Challenger for the high-speed rail crown. And this is no ordinary train. It's very difficult to explain what something looks like when it's so revolutionary. Birds have a beak. The beak on most birds is relatively short, but this beak just seems to go on and on. Then you just think it's going to be like a space rocket.
The technology behind this train was pioneered by a British engineering maverick and it is truly space age. Its designer is Professor Laithweight who's now developed an even more advanced motor. Now we can put a vehicle on this aluminium plate and see what a train of the future might look like. Uh I need a little more voltage for this. And there you have propulsion without physical contact. The idea is nicknamed maglev short for magnetic levitation. So we know that magnets attract but of course we also know that if you put the south pole and south pole together you can feel that force pushing away. And it's that force which magv trains used
to allow them to effectively hover slightly above the railway line. And then because of that hovering process, you now not wasting energy with wheels touching the railway lines. What magv does is it takes the friction of the ground out of the equation. It enables this cushion of air underneath the train. Effectively means the train go much faster. Leweight instantly recognized the potential of this technology. The high-speed game is of course the exciting one. He started off building models around the back garden and making small British rail magnetic levitation trains to carry people across to
airports as the future. But here in Britain, it never really took off. In Japan, on the other hand, this visionary technology is embraced as a solution to their transport problems. This is Tokyo. Over 10 million people make it the world's largest, most densely crowded, most rapidly growing city. In 1964, here is Japan starting at Shankan's hen service, but at the same time, research is starting on a magv train as well. Just over 50 years later, the end result is this. The L0 series Mag Lev train on April the 21st, 2015. The train travels at 375 m an hour to become the fastest train ever. If you got on the underground in central London and travel for 40
minutes, you could be at Heathrow. If it was going as fast as a Japanese magv, you'd be in Paris. The mag lev is super fast. The new Japanese mag, if it goes according to plan, is going to cost $50 billion. That's more than Japan spends on defense in a year and more than the GDP of a small country. Magnaf has proved to be very expensive in terms of the power needed. You need dedicated tracks completely different from rail tracks would require a whole new infrastructure.
Maglev is so expensive that at present only one other country has been prepared to commit funds to a train which makes no obvious commercial sense. China's magv line links Shanghai with its airport 20 m away in just 7 minutes. It's the fastest operating train in the world. The Chinese Mag Lev cost $1.2 billion and has yet to turn a profit. And although MAG Lev is first, amazingly, China is introducing a fleet of regular electric trains that can match it.
The Fuin, designed to travel at just under 250 mph, is its flagship, transporting commuters between Shanghai and Beijing in just 3 and 1/2 hours. Highspeed rail is becoming such a way of life in China that people are managing to travel for 300 miles for lunch and then come back again and be there in time for dinner. There are 75 million people. That's more than the population of Great Britain now living within just an hour's commute of Shanghai. Half of all train travel in China is on highspeed trains and it's something like a billion journeys a year. That's 4 million a day. Essentially, they were
the pupil, but they're the pupil turning master. China's 1 and a half billion people now move at speeds never before seen in history. But to pay for such a network, China relies on high levels of economic growth. To get it, ironically, communist China has lower taxes than most Western democracies. China has experienced an extraordinary economic growth since the beginning of the 1990s. Something like 800 million people have been pulled out of poverty in China. That's that's 10% of the world's population. This is a quite simply staggering rate of economic growth. And to sustain it for over 20 years is really unprecedented. That's quite remarkable.
I think a British chancellor would sell their soul to Satan to have a rate of growth like that. Although China's high-speed trains make a loss, it seems China can afford it. China's this huge country, huge population, big cities, and I think it's going to send a lesson to the rest of the world that as the world progresses with transportation, railways will always have a place. So, what is the future for trains? A Chinese aerospace company is developing an intercontinental train that'll go at Mac 3. That's three times the speed of sound. If their plans work out, you'll be able to zip from London to Sydney in just 4 and 1/2 hours.
Today, it takes over a day. That's amazing. The need for speed in our trains has driven innovation and propelled us into the modern era. From carts on tracks to the dawn of the steam age to highspeed rail and the promise of super fast intercity travel, trains have been around now for 200 years and they have absolutely changed the way that we live, the way we relate to each other, the way we view each other. The quest for ever faster trains hasn't just made the daily commute quicker. It has pushed the boundaries of engineering.
How are they going to change in the future? I don't know the answer to that. But the fact is that 200 years ago, people thinking about what the train could possibly do, they wouldn't have had the answers. There is almost nothing that connects Stevenson's rocket to the high-speed trains of today, apart from bizarrely the track gauge they're on. They're employing technology that is so beyond the ken of anyone of Stevenson's time. But they're still performing those same tasks, taking people and freight A to B. So there will probably be a role for the train for a long time to come.
