Buy this book on-line HUGHES, MURRAY: : RAIL 300 - The World High Speed Train RaceUK.NEWTON ABBOT,DEVON.DAVID & CHARLES,1988. ISBN 0715389637.
UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,illustrated,1st edn. FINE/FINE. No owner inscrptn,but price-clipped dw/dj.Black paper-covered boards,gilt letters to spine/backstrip.Colour photographic dw/dj.UK,8vo HB+ dw/dj,illustrated,1st edn,192pp includes Appendix,an Index,b/w maps and photographs. Contents pristine and tight.
Europe is in the throes of developing a new high speed rail network which will do for railways what the jet airliner did for air travel.Japan,too,has been among the world leaders in pushing rail speed frontiers ever higher,and in Rail 300,Hughes traces the story of the quest for higher rail speeds from its beginnings to the launch of the world's first regular services at 300km/h in 1989.
His starting point is the originally magic 100mph (160km/h),at one time thought to be the practical limit for conventional railways,a speed claimed to have been achieved for the first time on the Great Western Railway in England in 1904 by 4-4-0 City of Truro,at that time an outstanding event.But it was more than 50 years later with the arrival of diesel and
electric traction on a wide scale that day-in day-out speeds of 100mph and more became a reliable proposition.Today there is a strong lobby attempting to write off railways as a historic anachronism and which believes that future transport development will hinge on aircraft and motorways.How wrong they are is proved by railway developments of the last three decades and the construction of the 300km/h trains of tomorrow,which will take railways well into the 21st century.
Britain,birthplace of railways,is developing a new generation of high speed trains as successors to the Inter-City 125 - the only diesel-powered high speed train in the world - and soon British Rail(then) will be connected to the mainland European high speed rail network by the Channel Tunnel.Rail 300 surveys the development of high speed trains around the world,highlighting the outstanding success of the famous bullet trains in Japan and the TGVs in France,currently the world's fastest trains. But not all high speed trains have been winners, for there have been spectacular casualties where equipment has not matched the demands of reliability or cost.In Canada,the USA,and West Germany there have been disappointments while in Britain the Advanced Passenger Train,in which so many hopes were vested,has been finally laid to
rest.It is a fascinating story,which will interest not only railway enthusiasts who
follow the current railway scene but also the professional student of transport and those just curious about railways as an important means of travel.
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