The Man Who Built the World’s Fastest
Railway
By
Masaomi Ise
If the
Tokaido Shinkansen had never been built, and the passengers that it carries were
travelling by car, we would see as many as 12,000 additional traffic accident
injuries and fatalities every year. That’s
according to Britain’s The Economist. In the 40 years or so since its opening, the Shinkansen has
not had a single major accident, which speaks eloquently of its remarkable
safety features. It is also
remarkably efficient. If we were to
move the same number of Shinkansen passengers by bus, a bus would have to depart
every ten seconds. The Tomei
highway would be one long line of buses. Similarly,
it would take 100 jumbo jets to move the same amount of people.
In a sense, the Shinkansen is the main artery of Japan.
It is surprisingly safe and efficient, and yet kind to the environment. If not for the Shinkansen, it is certain that Japan’s
postwar economic growth would not have been so great.
Sons
of the Tokaido
The
Shinkansen had a great impact on the railways of the world.
At the time the Shinkansen made its debut run, the sun was setting on the
railway era. Track was being torn
up all over the US, and travel by train was being replaced by highway-centric
automobile transportation. It was
even predicted that long distance trains would have disappeared by the beginning
of the 21st century. But
the success of the Shinkansen turned that prediction on its head.
In
the end of the first year after the Tokaido Shinkansen opened, the SNCF (French
National Railway) developed the concept for the TGV. The following is from the book The TGV Challenge, published
in France in 1981. “The TGV is
the son of the Tokaido, and the step-brother of Italy’s Direttissima.”
The SNCF was keenly interested in and kept a close eye on Japan’s early
research in the 50s as well as the steps leading up to the Shinkansen launch and
operations throughout the 60s. Japan had left a strong impression on competitors
and partners alike through its employ of a completely new system that seemed to
turn common sense on its head.
Direttissima
was Europe’s first high-speed railway, linking Rome and Milan.
Construction on the Direttissima began six years after the Tokaido
Shinkansen opened. Not one to be
outdone, Germany began work on its ICE high-speed railway the same year.
ICE had a derailment accident in 1998 with a hundred or
more victims that illustrated tragically the terrible potential of
high-speed railway accidents.
The
high-speed railway that opened in South Korea last April uses the same
technology as France’s TGV. But
the TGV that was developed in Europe among relatively flat land resulted in a
number of safety issues for Korea’s geographic location involving tunnels and
typhoon countermeasures. Korea
sought the technical help of Japan, but was turned back immediately by Japan’s
response - “We emphasized the superiority of our system’s safety controls
when we were bidding on the project, to no avail, and to come to us now seeking
support is asking too much.” In
contrast, Taiwan with many of the same geographical and climatic conditions did
place a high value on Japan’s Shinkansen safety from the start and decided to
use it in their own system.
China
pitted Japan against France and Germany for the development of a high-speed
railway to link Beijing and Shanghai, but the plan that the Chinese side would
perform the manufacture and build under a technology transfer arrangement with
Japan tended to inspire fear and the Japanese side was unwilling to guarantee
the safety of the hardware. Each
seems to manifest with the face of the country where they are born, but in any
case, high-speed railways all over the world are truly Sons of Tokaido.
Mechanical Beauty Is Also Performance Superiority
Phillippe
Roumeguere who was SNCF vice council of technical development at the time of the
Shinkansen launch said this. “I
was very excited by the construction of Japan’s Shinkansen, and in part, that
is why I chose Japan as the destination for my honeymoon.
While in Japan I talked to a lot of people and read a lot of material
about the Shinkansen. The indelible impression I got was of the strong leadership
of Mr. Hideo Shima and the existence of the forerunner of the Railway Technical
Research Institute. People who had
served in military research during WWII had moved on to railway technology after
the war, and it was very impressive to see how these men’s theories and
research had contributed so greatly to the realization of the Shinkansen.”
In
investigating the reasons for the technical success of the Shinkansen, you will
eventually arrive at the existence of Hideo Shima, the lead engineer at the
time, as well as the engineers he led, many of whom had been involved during the
war in the development of military hardware such as the esteemed Reisen or Zero
Fighter plane of the Japanese Navy. Shima
had joined the Railway Ministry in 1925 where he worked in the manufacturing
bureau rolling stock department to nationalize production of steam locomotives.
As Shima
said, Rationality in mechanics always leads to beauty.
Mechanical beauty is also performance superiority.
During his ten years in the rolling stock department, his work in steam
locomotive design created a golden age for Japan’s engines.
He designed the powerful D51 freight locomotive which is the dream
machine of railway fans everywhere. The
D51 was esteemed not only for its power and good looks; its design was imbued
with ingenious details exhaustively thought-out that made it easy to maintain
and repair. That’s why the D51
was also the most loved locomotive
among actual maintenance and repair people too.
The fervor
of Shima who pursued the aesthetic beauty of a design that achieved an overall
balance of conflicting demands for performance, cost and ease of maintenance was
fully exploited in the development of the Shinkansen after the war.
Bullet
Train Designed Before the War
On July
29, 1939, the Railway Minister convened a council of trunk line railways, which
is where the concept of a so-called ‘bullet train’ that would link Tokyo to
Shimonoseki covering 1100 kilometers in 9 hours was first discussed.
A wide gauge (1435 mm) track with no street level crossings, utilizing
vertical crossings only such as bridges and tunnels was newly built on which
trains could run at 150 kph. The existing narrow-gauge track of the day(1067 mm) would
make the cars unstable at that speed. The
‘bullet train’ plan also called for a future train that would achieve 200
kph and link Tokyo and Osaka in 3.5 hours, amazingly close to the Tokaido
Shinkansen that finally emerged after the war.
The chief
architect of the plan was Yasujiro Shima, the father of Hideo Shima and a leader
in railway engineering himself. The
budget for the Dangan Ressha (bullet train) Plan was passed by the Diet the next
year, and tunnel construction began in 1941 with the Nihonzaka Tunnel in
Shizuoka, still in use today on the Tokaido route.
In 1940,
Hideo Shima was transferred to the Railway Ministry Construction Bureau, where
he was appointed to design the engine that would drive the bullet train.
If not for the war, the bullet train would probably have been completed
by 1954. But worsening war troubles caused the plan to be abandoned,
and Yasujiro Shima died shortly after the war broke out with his dream in life
only half realized.
Challenge the Wisdom of the World
“Don’t
you want to avenge your father?” So said Shinji Sogo, the newly appointed 4th
president of the JNR in the summer of 1955 to Hideo Shima, who had moved on from
his railway career to become executive director of Sumitomo Metals.
Sogo would go on to pour money into the realization of the Shinkansen
project, often in defiance of the politicians who maneuvered to bring railways
to their regions in order to gain votes, and as vice president of engineering,
Hideo Shima forged ahead on the technical development of the Shinkansen.
The combination of these two men was the driving force behind the
realization of the Shinkansen.
In order
to meet the stringent demands of freight volume on the Tokaido railway route at
the time, there was a plan to double capacity by constructing new narrow-gauge
tracks parallel to the existing line. This could have been accomplished at a relatively low cost.
But Shima was resolute about building new wider gauge track.
The wide gauge track could be the high speed line and the existing
Tokaido track would be the low speed line, in that way avoiding loss of time
spent in passing the lower speed trains and allowing for more efficient
scheduling. Newly built track would also enable use of the shortest
distance route between Tokyo and Osaka.
Another
thing that Hara was determined to build was an electrical multiple unit train.
At the time, the common wisdom held that long distance trains could only
be loco-hauled or locomotive style trains.
Loco-hauled means that the lead car is an engine or locomotive that pulls
the passenger cars which have no motive power.
In contrast, electrical multiple unit train means that each car has a
motor with its own locomotive power. Electric
motors at the time were extremely noisy and vibrated a great deal and so were
thought to be out of the question for use over extended long distance trips with
passenger cars.
But Shima
believed that noise and vibration problems could be solved technically, and
insisted that the many benefits of electric cars far outweighed the initial
investment in development. For
example, since it would not be necessary to run heavy locomotives, a lot of
money could be saved on the construction of track and bridges and energy
efficiency would also be high. Electric
trains were also easier to accelerate and decelerate which is an advantage for
high-speed operations. It would not
be necessary to switch the head engine to the back of the train at the terminal,
so that reversing direction would be much simplified.
The Tenacity of Navy Aeronautical Engineers
Even from
before the war, Shima had been sure of a future when high speed electric trains
would be the norm. In December
1945, just 4 months before the end of the war when Japan was a place of burned
out cities and half-starved populace, Shima invited Tadashi Matsudaira, a
leading Naval engineer, to come to the forerunner of the Railway Technical
Research Institute (RTRI) where he proposed the following.
“Mr.
Matsudaira, I want to put high speed long distance electric trains on the tracks
in Japan in the future. But the
trains we have today vibrate too much and are too noisy.
I would be hard-pressed to use these cars to carry passengers for
extended trips. I want to use your
knowledge and research in aeronautical engineering to resolve the vibration
problem.” Matsudaira was a
specialist at aircraft vibration reduction, and at the young age of 35 was
already regarded as an authority in this field. He was deeply impressed by this personage who spoke so
specifically about his original vision for the future of Japan’s railways.
Immediately
after the war, naval engineers like Matsudaira moved en masse to the railways.
The RTRI alone swelled from 500 to 1500 employees.
These men who had proven records in developing military hardware all had
the tenacity borne of the effort of postwar recovery and turned that to the
development of new railway technology.
“In
order to build a superior high speed passenger car, the first priority is to
successfully develop a vibration theorem for the passenger cars.”
In accordance with Shima’s policy, these aeronautical engineers who
were already enamoured of engineering theory together with the railway engineers
who were just as rich in real life experience tangled in white-hot arguments but
eventually completed a train car theorem of vibration.
At the time, there was no concept of high-speed trains in Europe or the
US and no one had worked on anti-vibration theory.
Japan’s success in this scientific area was a big shock to Europe and
America. It was a sign that the
tradition of technical excellence that had emerged in Japan’s aeronautics
before the war had been carried on to the next era.
Development Process Was Also Outside the Norm
The
implementation of the Shinkansen project was also outside the norm.
The record speed achieved by Japan’s railways at that time was 145 kph
on the Odakyu Railroad in 1957. And
yet the Shinkansen was proposed to start operating commercially at 200 kph.
Normally, field tests would be used to verify that the proposed train
could operate at over 250 kph, and then a mass produced trial train would be
tested over 1 million kilometers or more. Only
when reliability and durability had been thoroughly tested would the new train
be put into commercial operation. At least, that’s what common sense would predict.
But the
fact was that even if Shima’s team desired to conduct high-speed tests, there
was no track yet that would allow them to run a train at 200 kph.
When the new track was finally completed in June 1962, prototype cars
were used to conduct test runs. Four
months later they broke the 200 kph mark for the first time, and by March of the
following year they had set a new world record of 256 kph.
The
Shinkansen had just five and a half years from the approval by the National Diet
of a 200 billion yen budget in 1959 up till the 1964 Tokyo Olympics to establish
operations and achieve performance stability.
It was going to mean completion of almost a whole new railway system,
from track to bridges, stations, development and manufacture of 360 new cars,
training of operators, arranging for signals, electrical supply, scheduling..
but there could be no delays in construction schedule, and absolutely no
accidents.
Why
the Miracle Was Completed Successfully in Such a Short Time
In the
face of this challenge, Shima’s policy was in principle not to use any
untested new technology. In other
words, Shima believed that it was possible to realize a high-speed train that
could achieve 200 kph by putting together all the technical expertise that Japan
already possessed at the time. In
the preface to his book Tokaido Shinkansen Gijutsu Hattatsu Shi (Technical
History of the Tokaido Shinkansen) Shima says this.
“…
Namely, the technical knowledge that we had accumulated under the restriction of
operating a narrow gauge railway was at the point of bursting.
So that when we were given the opportunity to build from scratch on a
wide gauge scale the Tokaido Shinkansen, it was like the dam gave way and all
the accumulated technical knowledge flew out at once, so that in a miraculously
short time we were able to complete the project.”
As Shima often reflected later in life, “When it came to designing the
Shinkansen trains, for us who had worked so very hard under the limitations of
the narrow gauge, it didn’t seem technically difficult at all to work on a
wide gauge standard.”
The
Shinkansen can thus be seen as the culmination of Japan’s railway technology
that had been building up over the prewar and postwar decades, to blossom
seemingly overnight. However, at
the same time a large portion of that accumulation took form precisely because
of Shima’s vision of a high-speed long distance railway.
Intellect and Effort of the Japanese People
6:00am on
October 1, 1964. The ceremony for
the inaugural departure of Hikari No. 1 on Tokyo Station Platform 9 was about to
begin. As the departure bell
sounds, the ribbon is cut by the JNR president and the kusudama (paper ball
containing paper streamers) is broken open.
50 doves are released to applause from spectators, and the Hikari No. 1
takes off soundlessly from the platform.
Yet at
this public ceremony, Hideo Shima is nowhere to be seen.
He resigned together with Shinji Sogo at the end of Sogo’s second term
as JNR president in May of the previous year.
Shima was asked to remain in his post by the new president, but he
refused, saying that 99% completion was in view and there were no remaining
technical problems.
Shima at
his home in Tokyo watched the first Shinkansen pass by his window.
Later, when asked, he repeatedly said this.
“The
Tokaido Shinkansen was realized by exploiting existing technical expertise that
had accumulated in a variety of fields, and the creativity and ingenuity of all
involved. As the technical leader,
all I did was bring these elements together.”
There is a bronze monument at the Tokyo Station Shinkansen central
entrance, which reads, “This railway was built on the intellect and effort of
the Japanese people.”