The Bullet Train

The Japanese Government has been able to keep the lid on their problems by not addressing bad bank loans, bankrupt corporations and mounting debts.  The problem simmers because the Japanese politicians determined that confrontational politics have no place in the Japanese order.  The public is as yet unaware of how the finance and transportation ministries are going to deal with this absolute mountain of debt.  When the government informed the populace of another double header, the transportation problem coupled with the country’s banking disaster, the people just threw up their hands and stopped spending altogether, deepening the hole considerably and throwing the country into recession.  What would happen if the people  really knew the facts.  

The Japanese National Railway, has long been financially critically ill; its pieces have been distributed and the interest on its remaining debt has been enough to send the Japanese nation into shock.  When the bailout is complete which will occur sixty-one years from now; there won’t be enough tax money available to address it in anything but small fragments, the cost will have been at least the equivalent of three American Savings and Loan Disasters and six Mexican Fiascos. 

The high-speed rail phenomena began in 1965 when the Japanese National Railways inaugurated electrified bullet-train rail service (“shinkansen”) on its Takaido line, which serviced both the industrial centers of the east coast of Japan and the Island of Honshu.  Service was continually extended until the route was over 700 miles in length and had 60 trains, each making almost three trips a day at an average speed of 135 miles per hour.  The world gasped.  

Modern railroads had their start in England, but it was not until 1981 that Europe began getting into the modern railroad game in earnest.  In spite of the advances made by the Europeans, the Japanese remain both the innovators and leaders in this field.  The Japanese trains, invented by Hideo Shima (who died in 1998) are fast, quiet and an event to behold.  High-Speed trains have major refinements not required in old-fashioned railroad trains.  Substantially longer rails (over ½ mile), so that the glitches at track ends would be more seamless and the trajectory straighter and flatter. 

Of course, each of these requirements upped the price.  The extra long pieces of metal for track were difficult to handle in all stages of production and delivery making them a logistical nightmare to deal with.  Eliminating grades and curves required the construction of tunnels and bridges that were extremely costly.  In addition, the train windows were sealed, making air-conditioning mandatory and much more costly wheel suspensions had to be added for a smoother ride.  Even more expensive was the fact that the train was electrically motorized in each car rather than being pulled by a locomotive.  This eliminated air brakes, increased the train’s speed, allowed for each car to be literally independent of the whole and created a safer overall ride.  On the other hand, the cost of accomplishing this was substantial and it was not fully appreciated how complex the engineering would be when the project was initiated.  To its dismay, one of the early investors in the project was the World Bank, which gave the country $80 million towards financing the project, since in those earlier years the country just didn’t have the money to pull it off by itself. 

And you can well imagine why, as the original train service extended 320 miles in length, traveled in a straight line without any substantial changes in elevation throughout its length and required 3,000 new bridges and tunnels to be built to accommodate it.  When the project was completed, both Shima, its inventor and the President of the National Railways admitted that they had not put a pencil to the project’s overall cost and they resigned in embarrassment over how much money had been spent.  In spite of this fact, literally all of the railroads in Europe beat a path to Shima’s doorstep and he received awards from just about everywhere for his sterling accomplishment.  He later became head of Japan’s National Space Development Agency, and he served in this role until his retirement. 

In spite of the incomprehensible amount of money necessary to carry forward these grandiose schemes, no one in government has been dissuaded from going ahead with one nonsensical project after another. Japan does not easily lend itself to high tech innovations in travel because of the fact that the main island of Japan is more like a megapolis than a countryside and the cost of acquiring right of way is prodigious. 

In spite of this fact, the Japanese Government announced during recent elections that five new bullet train routes were going to be constructed.  This meant more jobs, it meant better transportation, and the people were overjoyed.  Overjoyed as well were the mayors of every city where the trains would stop.  Enormous bounties are paid by cities to have the train stop in their location, in spite of the fact that this only slows down what was meant to be a high speed train, the practice is pervasive, and the enormous price of getting the train to stop at a particular station is added to the tax base of the people that live there.  This is a cost of doing business, you might say, but a very high one indeed. 

Yet, what already is in place, as time has gone on is already falling apart at the seams; for example, there have been over 20 instances of “concrete falling from tunnel walls onto tracks.”  In one instance, chunks smashed a freight train, causing it to derail; in another, falling pieces hit an auto beneath an overpass.  While inspecting tunnels in December, the private railway company that operates bullet trains in western Japan amazingly found about 40,000 weak sections.  Says Iwao Trsukahara, a worker in the Saga prefecture who helped build the rail lines: “Knowing how the work was done, I wouldn’t ride the shinkansen.  The crumbling concrete is graphic evidence of the rotting underbelly of Japan’s economy.  Workers often cut corners to finish construction quickly.  Steel-reinforcement rods sometimes weren’t installed at all. 

A new line is being built between Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, Japan’s most important economic centers.  The brand spanking new train will use the Nagoya Railway Station (which has not had a renovation in 63 years) for its home.  Can you imaging these newly designed trains geared to run 300 miles per hour coming into a ice-age Tokyo Train Station and creating a sonic boom that collapses the whole ball of wax into a heap.  So where do the non-bullet, freight trains go if the high-speed ones are talking over the tracks.  There is one obvious problem that remains unanswered, and one not so obvious. The easy one is: how do you make room for a mile-long freight train to be passed when the bullet-train in question is traveling at 300 miles an hour.  The Japanese accident record for their trains has been outstanding, but they certainly are “an accident waiting to happen.”  

In addition, there are 125 private and joint private-government financed railways in Japan.  Some of them are even tourist lines.  Others operate like the Japan Railway Freight Company, which owns its own trains (including locomotives and cars) and terminals, yet have no track.  It leases track right of way from the companies that form the Japan Railways Group, the very same folks that run the bullet trains. The Japan Railways Group is a successor to the failed Japanese National Railways, which tanked in 1987 from an over abundance of debt.  The whole thing almost seems most incongruous.  

In building this super-fast trains, poor-quality cement was used. When Japan ran out of sand from its riverbeds, it substituted beach sand without removing the salt (an ingredient that accelerates corrosion).  More than three decades of daily pounding has created a recipe for disaster.  “There is no way to estimate the extent of the fatigues,” writes Kazusuke Kobayashi, an engineering professor at the Chiba Institute of Technology whose book “Concrete Is in Danger” was a bestseller in Japan last year.  The possibility of an overpass suddenly collapsing while a bullet train runs through cannot be ruled out.  Japanese engineers have announced to the press that they are extremely disturbed by how little money the country spends on maintenance.  Taketo Uomoto, a University of Tokyo engineering professor, figures that less than 10% of the country’s construction budget goes toward preservation and repair.  “We don’t have a habit of taking care of existing structures,” he says.  “Historically we had wood structures that were destroyed by fires so regularly that we got used to rebuilding.”  

Hosei University political scientist Takayoshi Igarashi believes the neglect has a sinister motivation: Japanese construction companies, which have considerable political clout, make a lot more money building new roads, dams and trains than they can make by patching up the existing ones. So the country keeps building.  And building.  “Japan is like a drug addict,” says Igarashi, who likens the nation appetite for concrete and steel to a junkie’s craving for his next fix.  

In 1998, the most recent year for which figures are available, Japan spent 15% of its GDP on construction, compared with than 8% in the U.S. “What Japan has done is far more enormous than anything the socialist countries did,“ says Igarashi.  The spending continued during the boom years and even after the bubble burst a decade ago.  Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi shows no signs of trying to kick the construction habit.  Since taking office 18 months ago, he has made old-fashioned Keynesian pump-priming a centerpiece of economic recovery plan, spending $142 billion on supplementary budgets to pay for public-work projects.”[5] 

The article goes on to give several examples of how out of control Japanese spending has become, 

“All that building has left Tokyo and other local governments with debt totaling an estimated $6 trillion.  Landscapes are littered not only with crumbling tunnels and bridges, but also with white-elephant projects built to win votes and reward construction companies for their patronage.  That’s why rural Oita prefecture in Kyushu built an airport used almost exclusively by farmers to fly their green onions and bell peppers to Tokyo.  And why Kyushu’s Kagoshima prefecture has a $117 million, 675-meter bridge that connects the mainland with an island inhabited by 350 people.  Hokkaido has a wide ribbon of highway that almost nobody drives on.  And Kobe is building an airport even though there’s a perfectly fine terminal in Osaka, just 16 miles away.” [6]   

Another one of the problems relative to high-speed trains is the fact that the wider the gauge, the smoother the ride, but the more expensive the construction.  All American gauges are similar, with the obvious exception of the old scenic mining railroads in the West that didn’t connect to any other line and are today only used for showing tourists the Wild West as it once was.  However, in Russia for example, there is probably a gauge for each time zone and they have a whole bunch of time zones, and in Europe, you have a different gauge for virtually each country.  

Japan has learned the hard way that smaller gauge size decreases costs dramatically and has done two things to accommodate the economics.  The first is to reduce the gauge size of the bullet trains, and the second is to invent a train-wheel that is (more or less) universal.  Thus, in spite of the fact that the original Japanese trains use conventional gauges, more recent tracks constructed for the bullet trains are much more narrow.  “This is rarely a problem in the United States, where the only narrow-gauge lines as we noted earlier are a couple of scenic tourist railways; but in Japan, the bullet trains operate on a different gauge from standard trains, so a transfer between lines in the past has meant getting off the train.  On a gauge-changing train, each wheel on the power car has an independent suspension and traction motors.  When changing gauges, the weight of the axle is carried on linear bearing running down the side of the tracks.”[7] 

Still unsatisfied, the Japanese are still pushing the envelope and have a new technology that will allow the trains to travel close to 300 miles per hour.  The Japanese are using the new technology called “maglev” (Magnetic Levitation), which  requires a magnetic system raising the train slightly off the metal tracks and letting it travel on a bed of air.  “The super conducting magnets on the train induce a current within coils on the sides of the U-shaped guideway, which then act as electromagnets that push the cars away, causing them to float above the guideway.  But, the superconductors involved, need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures.  Still, the system has carried passengers at speeds exceeding 340 miles per hour.”[8] Some have called this the first new mode of transportation since the invention of the airplane, and the fast paced Japanese are eagerly awaiting developments.  

In the meantime, there seems no question about the fact that if you had to build a high-speed train, Japan would just about the last place you would pick.   Compared with rapid-transit railways in Europe, the construction cost per kilometer for the shinkansen is very high.  Why? 

Why Shinkansen Requires High Construction Costs [9] 

In general, rapid-transit railways require a large investment in electric-related construction, including signaling and safety systems, power systems and communication systems.  However, the civil engineering costs, such as banking, bridges and tunnels, still dominate the expense ledger by accounting for approximately 70% of the train’s total cost. 

The “shinkansen” requires higher civil-engineering costs than European rapid-transit railways for the following reasons: 

1.         Too many tunnels:  high mountains are common in Japan and the ratio of tunnel sections to the total length of the shinkansen tends to be high.  The total tunnel length of the existing four-shinkansen lines is an unbelievable 30.8% of the total length of the lines. 

2.         Few sections can use economic banking: Frequent earthquakes, heavy rain and deep weak ground on the plains do not suit the economic banking method and few sections can use it.  Elevated track (including site acquisition cost) costs about four times that of banking the track. 

3.         High environmental costs:  To meet the strict environmental standards, cost for sound barriers and ballast mats, etc., tend to be high. 

4.         Short station-station distance: The distance from station to station is too short (30 to 40 km) to achieve rational transportation compared with European rapid-transit railways.  Station construction requires higher costs, raising the total construction price tag.  

In spite of all of the negatives, Japan’s trains are a wonder of civilization, and whether or not they are ever paid for, mankind has once again demonstrated the ability to at least temporarily conquer nature, given the time, the money, the knowledge and the resources.  While the bullet train does not economically work in Japan, these trains will still be running throughout the rest of the world, where at least they will probably be more economically viable.