Sykesville’s a train town built along the tracks along the Patapsco River. One of our best restaurants (we’ve only got two) is a refurbished train station, and until very recently one of the coolest stores on Main Street was Purkey’s Toy Trains, which unfortunately fell victim of the times.
No doubt the bullet trains when they come to this country will pass this small old town by. But it’s nice to know that trains have a future. Really fast trains and not just in Japan, France, and China. We hope.
This is from Wired Magazine.
Believe it: Bullet trains are coming. After decades of false starts, planners are finally beginning to make headway on what could become the largest, most complicated infrastructure project ever attempted in the US. The Obama administration got on board with an $8 billion infusion, and more cash is likely en route from Congress. It’s enough for Florida and Texas to dust off some previously abandoned plans and for urban clusters in the Northeast and Midwest to pursue some long-overdue upgrades. The nation’s test bed will almost certainly be California, which already has voter-approved funding and planning under way. But getting up to speed requires more than just seed money. For trains to beat planes and automobiles, the hardware needs to really fly. Officials are pushing to deploy state-of-the-art rail rockets. Next stop: the future.
A long time ago the fastest trains in the world were built in England and then Germany and France. Now it seems to be a race between the French, the Chinese, and the Japanese. Currently the Chinese have the fastest passenger train in the world.
The Japanese train in this video floats on thin air and uses magnets to shoot it along. It’s amazingly fast, but super expensive. Imagine something like this flying past Sykesville? The town would fall down.
Although Wired thinks we’re on our way to doing this sort of thing, do you? It would require the sort of cooperation between government, technology, science, and business that we should do better than anyone in the world.
But do we have the money, the will, the know how, the talent, and resources? And the sort of political structure that could enable this sort of synergistic cooperation between all sorts of smart people? Or are we a backward nation full of arguing idiots who will let the Chinese blow right past us on a bullet train into the future?
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