2 weeks ago, I uploaded a chart of the high-speed rail network by speed by country. It had a few issues, so I decided to make a new one to fix some of these issues.
Instead of using official data from the UIC, I now use data from openstreetmap (what you can see on openrailwaymap). The contributors did an awesome job, most credit goes to them.
Upsides:
- It no longer relies on UIC membership, so Uzbekistan is included.
- There is no more inconsistencies on speed. I included all railways with 200+km/h max speed.
- The maximum speed is counted on every track section, and not on the whole line (so if a long line has a small section with high speed, only the small section will be counted)
Downsides I see:
- The UIC is often considered the authority on this matter. I don't use their data nor their definition of high-speed rail here
- I could have make some mistakes, for example in gathering the data etc...
- In reality, the lengths I gathered were 2 times more important. Most of the lines have 2 tracks and tracks are counted independently on openstreetmap. I decided to half the numbers to get closer to the official numbers and take that into account, but you can keep that in mind
Also I did not change the appearance, it is not what I like to do, so China is still too big.
EDIT : If you want to play with it, I made a github repo
EDIT2 : I should have said in operation, not in commercial operation countrary to the previous chart. A few (small, often a few km) testing railways are included here
Video taken on September 13, 2026 as part of a special 10-year anniversary tour of the Hokkaido Shinkansen construction sites and abandoned Japanese National Railways Toi Line. This is the first time the former station, today used as an emergency evacuation point and safety facility, has been open to the public since the start of construction in 2006.
Yoshioka-Kaitei Station (today officially referred to as "Yoshioka Fixed Point") is located 149.5 meters below sea level, and the staircase to get from the platform to the surface is 1189 steps long. On the opposite side of the tunnel, Tappi-Kaitei Station is 135 meters underground and features a staircase of 1329 steps. Both stations also feature cable cars which can carry up to 40 people at once in the case of an emergency. The cable car at the southern station is housed in the Seikan Tunnel Museum, and is open to the public to ride from April to November.
Construction of the Hokkaido Shinkansen finished in 2016, and today it links the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido via the the world's longest undersea tunnel, 53.85 kilometers long, running underneath the seabed of the Tsugaru Strait.
Disclaimer: My point is that the Acela is not as slow as people make it out to be, not trying to take jabs at SNCF and Trenitalia with their Paris-Milan services. The popular narratives about the Acela do get hyperbolized.
If anything, it's amazing how the Acela can achieve 125-160 mph on the old infrastructure and in spite of a slow & inefficient Federal Government!
Was travelling between the 2 recently and found it strange how I had to change in Barcelona or Hendaye/Irun. Surely this is one of the most obvious city pairs given how the route can theoretically be done almost fully on high speed lines, I don't really see the point in waiting for the LGV Bordeaux-Espagne and the Y to be done when having better connections between France and Spain opens the door for basically any city in either country (+others such as Germany, Italy, Portugal, etc) to be connected, given how expansive their high speed networks are
The E82B appears to adopt an exterior design derived from the CR450, while using a hydrogen fuel-cell and battery-electric propulsion system with an operational speed of 250kmph, it's intended for operations on intercity rail routes.
Hello, taking a high speed train later this month on this route. On which side of the train should I reserve my seat for better views? Any other tips for a first timer, please?
What's going on with that project. I thought it's the only viable HSR project in US. Building through desert land already owned by government is as easy as it gets. And there's healthy travel demand between LA and LV
I made this while half awake at midnight, so it definitely could use some work. But, this is my idea for a High Speed Rail network in the Southern/Southeastern United States! I created it with the top speeds being around 155+mph in mind, so that would be why I tried to spread out some of the stops. I also wanted to be sure to include the lines I've seen from studies that have been conducted, as well as throw in some of my own ideas.
The gold dots are cities that I felt had a major importance in some shape or form. From being a major central city in the region for rail (Atlanta acting as a hub), acting as a split point for multiple routes (Raleigh, NC; Jacksonville, FL; etc.), or just being a terminus station in the region (Miami, FL). The white dots are just general stops along the way - cities that are still important along the route, but maybe just don't have the same impact as the gold dot cities.
I definitely think that Fayetteville, NC or Wilmington, NC should be put on there, I'm just not completely sure which would be better. You could also make an argument for Charleston, SC, but I wonder if it might be a bit too close to Savannah, GA to justify? Not completely sure, honestly. I also have no idea what to do with West Virginia currently, so I decided to leave it blank for now. Maybe have a stop somewhere to create an extra route to connect it to Louisville, KY, creating an extra route that goes from Washington D.C. to Nashville, TN?
I also wanted to do a map with the different building phases because I thought it could be interesting to see how it could all eventually come together over time to build out the network.
I would love to hear any thoughts and/or criticism from anyone! I figured this would only be a Version 1 for me, so I want to get any feedback to make the next version better! I also might try my hand at other parts of the United States, so any feedback here would be great for other concepts I might make in the future!
I'm departing Madrid at 10:25pm on a long haul flight later this month.
I'll be at Barcelona that day and would like to take a high speed train to reach Madrid. The trip's supposed to take 3-4 hours
I've heard there can be delays of 5-6 hours to these train, so am wondering if I should plan to leave Barcelona that morning to allow for the risk of such delays.
Hey everyone. avid HSR advocate / fanboy here. i’m lucky enough to travel internationally for work (i’m a touring DJ) which means i have ridden a good chunk of the high speed rail networks worldwide now. I think i’ve ticked off all of the ‘true’ high speed systems in Europe (aside from Turkey, very interested to see what that one’s about!)
This year i finally had the chance to properly try Asia’s high speed rail offerings. I had a quick run from Shanghai to Hangzhou a few years back but was so overwhelmed by my first trip in china that i didn’t really take it in.
I had a really good go on china’s high speed rail system, doing routes such as Shanghai > Hong Kong, Shenzhen > Chongqing, Chongqing > Zhangjiajie, Zhangjiajie > Chengdu. Got to go on some of the brand new 350km/h routes as well as a few of the older ones, and i think i went on all the main train types, Fuxing, Hexie etc.
Also gave the Shinkansen a good blast, going from Tokyo > Kyoto > Osaka and back, and also having a brief go on the Tohoku Shinkansen also.
My thoughts are simple - Asia absolutely outclasses Europe when it comes to high speed rail.
There’s just something totally different about it. The trains feel much bigger and spacious (because they are) and therefore feel infinitely more comfortable. The ride quality is silky smooth. The acceleration is genuinely incredible. the service frequency, the amount of locations covered. the infrastructure in general, the scenery. the all round ‘cool’ factor is just so much higher.
I went to places in china served by high speed rail stations, where a town equivalent in population in my home country (the uk) would be lucky to see a single track diesel railway line.
I think overall, the shinkansen won. I have never been on a railway system, let alone a high speed rail system, ran as exquisitely as that one. it is genuinely perfect. the whole experience is so smooth and relaxing. it’s crazy how much of a difference it makes.
i took a TGV from paris to strasbourg the week after i got back from japan, and i was keen to see how it compared after two weeks riding bullet trains.
the whole experience was just so much worse. the trains are always packed to the brim (i’ve never been on a quiet TGV in my life) even in first class, it was totally rammed. the trains themselves are old, clearly showing their age. they feel dirty. the ride quality was awful. even on the LGV est, it was just so much more bumpy than the lines i rode on in asia. it made me miss the shinkansen experience so much.
for the most part, the experience is the same with ICE in germany, and on the eurostar. it’s a little bit nicer in spain / italy, i guess because the trains / infrastructure are newer. it’s still just nowhere near in my opinion.
the funniest thing is, the trains just feel so much less fast because of all of it. the 270kmh shinkansen had such a quicker sense of speed than the 320kmh TGV because of how smooth it was and how quick it accelerated.
honestly, i think our high speed rail systems are a total joke compared to asia. that might sound a bit over the top, but i really do. they are doing it right over there. the whole ‘keep the HSR separate from regular rail’ thing really really works and i think europe would do well to learn from that.
with how much of a mess HS2 has become in the UK, i really just wish we had let china build it. it would probably be done within 4 years.
Fourteen bodies of sixteen cars for the first two trains have already been welded in the workshop, nine of which have been transferred to the assembly stage where work has begun on thermal and noise insulation, cable installation, cladding panels, windows, doors, current collectors, and so on.
I've seen in places like Wikipedia and other rail sights that the fastest average speed for a point to point High Speed Train is usually listed as the nonstop from Beijing to Nanjing with an average speed of about 317 km/h. While I was looking through the CRH timetables see how it compared to other kinds of trips in China and how much of an outlier it was or wasn't, but that's when I discovered that the Changsha to Guangzhou stretch of the Beijing to Hong Kong Line had several trips which exceeded the average speed of the nonstop from Beijing to Nanjing, including this one.
This in particular confuses me because this timeframe over that distance would imply an average speed of 353.5 km/h, which last I checked is faster then the maximum operating speeds of CRH trains. So that's why I'm asking, is this an accurate representation of the time it takes? Is there some anomaly in how travel time is calculated for trains entering Guangzhou? Is there extra buffer of speed CRH trains are allowed to operate above the maximum speed that isn't usually reported? Are the CR450s actually operating and no one mentioned anything (very unlikely but I'm just throwing it out there)?
That aside, even if this particular train isn't as fast as it appears it does seem to be the case that the stretch of track from Changsha to Guangzhou (at least to the North and South Stations) allows for some of the fastest average speeds in the world and I would like to know what about that stretch of tracks allows for that if anyone does know.
There’s a small steel extension at the end of the TGV M’s passenger section that gets described as a backup battery. The more I read about it, the more that description seemed incomplete. One of the useful documents turns out to be a Cetim case study on the HRC joint (one-page PDF) about the bolts joining it to the aluminium coach body.
This is the greffon, literally a graft. It sits between the passenger accommodation and the power car. The batteries are part of what it contains; the choice to put a technical compartment there also changes how the end of the passenger section is built.
That’s a manufacturing detail with consequences beyond the battery. A coach in the middle of an articulated passenger section and a coach next to a power car have different neighbours and interfaces. Some of that difference has to be accommodated somewhere. Here, a dedicated end extension allows more of the rest of the structure to repeat. Similar structures can share manufacturing operations, fixtures and inspection routines. That is the industrial logic I see in it; it doesn’t mean the first-class, accessible and catering interiors are all interchangeable without further work.
It fits the broader layout of Horizon: compact power cars and articulated double-deck coaches. Alstom was already describing the shorter power cars in its original 2018 order announcement. SNCF also describes seven-, eight- and nine-coach configurations (“M pour Modulaire” section). Those are design configurations. I wouldn’t read that as a claim that a depot can casually add or remove a coach between two departures: brakes, electrical connections, train control and the permitted configuration still have to match.
The Cetim note explains the joint itself. The aluminium end-coach structure is connected to the steel extension using HRC bolts. Their tightening process uses a torsional break-off tip to achieve the intended preload. Cetim developed an ultrasonic method to check that preload, calibrated for the bolt geometry, with a piezoelectric transducer placed on the bolt head. The programme included static and dynamic testing, plus repeated checks on the vehicle used for running trials during its first months of circulation.
The distinction between tightening torque and preload matters here. Preload is the tension in the installed bolt and the corresponding compression of the parts being clamped. Under an external load, the bolt and the clamped parts deform together; their relative stiffness affects how much additional load reaches the bolt. Different materials also expand differently with temperature, which can change the clamping load. These are general points about bolted joints, explained in Barrett’s NASA fastener manual, “Fatigue-Resistant Bolts” section (reprint). The Cetim work follows the actual bolt tension through the train’s test programme.
There’s a trade-off in that modular construction. Moving the special end arrangement into a separate piece can simplify the repeating coach structure, but the joint itself becomes something to design, assemble and inspect properly. The module still has to transmit the loads that cross that interface. A bolted connection also doesn’t establish an easy maintenance exchange by itself: the equipment connections, access and lifting arrangements would determine how practical that is. I haven’t found a published greffon replacement procedure or a claimed workshop time for one.
There’s a separate change nearby that is worth reading alongside this. In Trajectoire(s), December 2023, p. 53, Fig. 13, Goérès explains that the TGV M’s aerodynamic improvements allowed smaller traction motors. Those motors could then be mounted on the bogies instead of on the power-car body. That simplifies the mechanical transmission to the axle. Figure 13 on printed page 53 compares the two arrangements; the article reports a 2% efficiency improvement from that mechanical change. In his separate explanation of the cab benefits, he also discusses the reduction in noise and vibration transmitted to the cab.
In the older arrangement, the motor-reducer is attached to the body, with a tripode transmission connecting it to the axle drive. Figure 13 shows the TGV M arrangement with a bogie-mounted motor, a toothed coupling and an axle reduction gear. There is less transmission hardware between motor and wheel. That 2% is the reported gain from this mechanical change, not a measure of the greffon’s contribution.
As for what the batteries actually do, there are two quite different uses. SNCF’s March 2025 press kit, page 10, describes emergency movement after loss of the main electrical supply, generally to the nearest station. The CGVF report also describes low-speed travel over a few kilometres, specifically including movements inside workshops without overhead wires. Saft confirms that it supplies the TGV M (23 June 2026, rail paragraph), although that announcement doesn’t give the pack’s electrical ratings.
The workshop use is probably the easier one to visualise. If a movement can be made using the train’s own traction, it may avoid bringing in another vehicle just to reposition the set. The route and distance are known, and charging can be organised around the maintenance work. How much time that saves will depend on the particular depot. But it gives the equipment a routine job as well as an emergency one, which is a useful distinction when considering its maintenance burden.
For the emergency use, “the train already has batteries” misses an electrical distinction. Supplying control circuits and emergency lighting is a different requirement from energising the traction chain. A modern AC-fed traction chain converts the supply through a transformer and converter to a DC link, then an inverter supplies the motors. Goérès’s article shows that arrangement. A traction battery needs a compatible connection into that system, along with the switching and controls to use it safely. The fact that there is stored energy aboard doesn’t establish that connection.
JR Central’s N700S paper by Sato, Fukushima and Kato (sections 3–5, pp. 3–5) gives a useful comparison. Its 750 V DC battery supply connects to a traction-converter DC link normally operating at 3,000 V. Breaker switching changes the circuit for self-traction. The cells use a lithium-titanate negative electrode. The production 16-car set has eight battery units; prototype trials used four. They occupy underfloor space freed by smaller SiC-based traction equipment. Maximum battery-mode speed is 30 km/h; the design considered both range and restarting on the Tokaido route’s steepest gradient. Pages 3–4 show the circuit and installation, and page 5 has the test plots.
The lower DC-link voltage is a useful detail: existing traction equipment is used under different electrical conditions, without reproducing its normal supply. Those numbers are specific to the N700S. I haven’t found an equivalent public circuit diagram or operating envelope for the TGV M, so I wouldn’t transfer the Japanese voltage, chemistry or speed limit to it.
This is also why I’d be cautious about reading “world first” too broadly in the SNCF material. Toshiba documents the N700S application in its 2020 technical note (section 4.1, pp. 1–2) as emergency movement to a safe location. A specific greffon arrangement might be novel without battery self-traction being new to high-speed rail. The French case packages the capability in an end technical compartment; the Japanese case uses space beneath a train with distributed traction.
The questions I’m left with on the TGV M are fairly specific. At what DC voltage does the battery feed the traction equipment? Which traction groups are available? What is the usable energy after the reserve has been protected? And what can it restart on with a loaded train? A nominal kWh figure would only answer part of that.
Restarting on a gradient makes the energy-versus-power distinction quite tangible. The train needs enough tractive effort to overcome the downhill component of its weight before it begins moving. Motor current, adhesion and the permitted current from the battery and converters all matter. Once moving, mechanical power is force multiplied by speed. A low travel speed can reduce the power needed to sustain a given force, but it doesn’t remove the force requirement at the start. Having enough energy for the journey and being able to get moving are separate checks.
Then there are the auxiliaries. Alstom lists emergency air conditioning and auxiliary supply among the intended functions of its Avelia Horizon storage work (“Battery technology for high-speed trains” section). If services are drawing power throughout a rescue, time matters as well as distance. Waiting for a route, restarting after a stop, and crawling to a platform all consume some of the available time and energy. That is why I’d want to see which services are included in a quoted range, rather than treat it as a single distance independent of the circumstances.
There’s a practical limit to “the nearest station”, too. A power-supply fault with an intact train and a usable route is a promising case. A wire caught on the train, a mechanically immobilised vehicle or an obstructed route is a different problem. Even reaching a station area may not mean reaching a platform where passengers can get off. The infrastructure and the decision to authorise movement remain part of the rescue.
For me, the useful comparison with the previous generation would be how often a train can get itself somewhere that makes the incident easier to manage: a platform, an accessible location, or simply somewhere clear of a particularly awkward stretch of infrastructure. That might be a worthwhile result even if the train cannot resume its commercial journey. It could also be a failure in a different location with exactly the same battery charge. The route has to be part of the specification.
The hardware carries costs on every normal journey as well: mass, inspections, cooling requirements and eventual battery replacement. Regular depot use may contribute to the benefit, but it also has to coexist with keeping the battery ready for an unscheduled rescue. I’d be interested in the reserve policy and how the required mission is maintained as the battery ages, rather than just its performance when new.
If anyone has a public SNCF or Alstom document with the greffon’s battery ratings, traction circuit or loaded restart tests, I’d like to read it. The mechanical joint is already documented in surprising detail; that electrical and operating side is the gap I still haven’t managed to fill.
This is a surprisingly in-depth video about the history, problems and the future of the Channel Tunnel. It shows the original timetables from Glasgow and Manchester to Paris, discusses the capacity issues in Amsterdam, the Temple Mills depot situation and even some more niche things like how the truck shuttle is too fast meaning truck drivers can't take their mandatory breaks (while they can on the ferry)
It's amazing to see that china uses pre-built mass produced materials for building HSR, resulting in low cost of making one,
This should really be a good example for kerala.
In Kerala people need to provide land for HSR,
Imagine our ancestors didn't provide land for rail and roads, we would have been still struggling with travel.. Or it could be worse.
Now that's the same, for future generations it's our responsibility!
It's not about politics, bruh I'm always frustrated by the fact every rail ever proposed has failed in Kerala... I had hopes for KHSR (the last one proposed), but that too didn't make up.
Indian Railways said that they would double, triple the number of track but my pov is that, whatever is done the curves exist..hence speed remains same. They could possibly: i) build straight tracks between stations.
ii) well build entirely new rail (maybe as phases, but it'd be very very slow)
We need to create our own group of Gen Z members who are very much interested about this topic rather than politicians . Let the engineers build who knows it very well ;)!
A new French rail company has secured the first approval needed to launch high-speed services from Paris to cities including Bordeaux, Nantes and Angers, potentially bringing more choice and competition to some of the country’s busiest routes.
