Put it this way: the Shinkansen plying the Tokaido route have access to some 180, 000 potential passengers per mile of high-speed track.
The small section of high-speed track will be connected at both ends to existing lines used by Amtrak, the government-owned passenger railway.
The high-speed track suits the Red Bull car and there remain questions about the Brawn car's ability to be competitive in the lower ambient temperatures that are usual at Spa-Francorchamps.
By the end of last year, the Railways Ministry had overseen the construction of 8, 358 kilometers of high-speed rail track.
While there's nothing like screaming around a track at high speed, doing so in a whisper-quiet car is a new experience altogether.
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It only has one recognized high-speed link: the recently-opened stretch of Eurostar track to Paris and Brussels.
To exploit the power of modern high-speed locomotives, engineers resort to tilting trains and special track free of sharp bends: it's cheaper than tearing up the existing rails and starting again.
It turns out, she writes, that the whole diagnosis is based on one experiment from the 1960s in which doctors strapped 50 monkeys onto a track and slammed them into a wall at high speed.
But a grassroots project called the Bioweathermap was launched a year ago to discover and track the worldwide movements of these organisms using high-speed DNA sequencing of the biological residue on paper currency, one of the most oft-handled and well-traveled of objects.
While all of these improvements are greatly needed, funding high-speed rail piecemeal and state-by-state instead of as a federal project means that train and track technology may differ.
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