Why Does America Suck So Bad At Trains?

This week, Virgin, the NASA of precision-engineered god awful mass transit, unveiled the maiden voyage of its very own Hyperloop. Inside of this human pneumatic tube experiment, a two-person pod was shot across the Nevada desert at a speed of 100mph over a distance of well over 500 yards. Thanks to this rousing success, Virgin estimates a fully working train will arrive in a few years, which everyone who has ever taken a Virgin train knows means anywhere between 2025 and the heat death of the universe.  

So ... big whoop? I know that America's train system is still stuck somewhere between the Bronze and Ancient Greek age, but to the rest of the world, shooting off what looks like a weaponized Mini Cooper suppository down a not-that-long tube isn't all that impressive. As pointed out by self-proclaimed transportation planner and online person @HeheWaitWhut, other countries (especially in Asia) are much closer to releasing the train of tomorrow today, and theirs don't shake harder than an Appalachian steam locomotive trying to out-run a pack of dire mountain goats.

In Japan and China, Shinkansen bullet-trains and Fuxing trains respectively have been whizzing through the countryside at breakneck speeds for many years. Constantly being innovated, Japan's new N700s trains can even push 186 miles or 300 kilometers per hour without breaking a sweat. As if that wasn't fast enough, in 2019, the country started a three-year testing plan of its new ALFA-X bullet-train, which not only consists of 10 carts instead of one pod but can also hit speedy highs of 224 mph (360 kph).

But when it comes to speed and comfort, both Japan and China know that the real future is in magnetic levitation or maglev trains. These floating phallic powerhouses straight out of an above-average Herbert Frank sci-fi novel are liable to hit speeds that'll make your face tremble more than the panic-plastered smiles of those two Virgin employees shaking harder than astronauts on re-entry. China's first maglev train hovered out in 2002, and both countries are in the process of manufacturing maglevs which can hit highly competitive speeds from anywhere between 372 mph (600 kph) and 374 mph (603 kph). 

Compare that to the frankly limp-trained attempts of one-pod chumps like the British Virgin and Elon Musk, who has been trying to get on the hyperloop hype train for years without anything to show for it except for a few cocktail napkin doodles, and maybe it's not worth throwing our bowler hats in the sky to celebrate American train travel finally entering the 20th century.

For more less-than-quick witticisms, do follow Cedric on Twitter. 

Top Image: James Duncan Davidson/CC BY-NC 3.0, Virgin Hyperloop