Shinkansen
Bullet train at the Tokyo train station
The Shinkansen, colloquially known in English as the bullet train, is a network of high-speed railway lines in Japan. Initially, it was built to connect distant Japanese regions with Tokyo in order to aid economic growth and development.
Starting with the Tōkaidō Shinkansen (515.4 km) in 1964, the network has expanded to currently consist of 2,764.6 km of lines with maximum speeds of 240–320 km/h. The network presently links most major cities on the islands of Honshu and Kyushu, and Hakodate on northern island of Hokkaido, with an extension to Sapporo. The maximum operating speed is 320 km/h.
The original Tōkaidō Shinkansen, connecting Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, three of Japan's largest cities, is one of the world's busiest high-speed rail lines. In the one-year period it carried 159 million passengers, and since its opening more than five decades ago, it has transported more than 5.6 billion total passengers. The service on the line operates much larger trains and at higher frequency than most other high speed lines in the world. At peak times, the line carries up to thirteen trains per hour in each direction with sixteen cars each (1,323-seat capacity and occasionally additional standing passengers) with a minimum headway of three minutes between trains.
