By Ben Jones, CNN
(CNN) — At 186 miles per hour, the landscape starts to blur. A mile disappears every 20 seconds. An entire town can blink by in the time it takes to remember its name.
High-speed trains are, as the name suggests, fast. When two are traveling toward each other, the distance between them can close at double their top speed. Sixty seconds after they pass — a moment when the drivers barely have the chance to exchange a friendly wave — they can be six miles apart, relentlessly powering across the countryside, each with more than 1,000 passengers on board.
That breathtaking pace makes the recent deadly crash between two high-speed trains in Spain even more alarming. Despite an extraordinary global safety record, the derailment on a straight stretch of track was a stark reminder of how exceptional, and how fragile, these systems can be.
So what’s it like to be responsible for one of these machines when something goes wrong?
“Driving on high-speed lines is just a different kind of driving,” says Paul Cooper, who has worked for 13 years as a driver and instructor for Southeastern, which operates high-speed trains connecting to London on HS1, a railway built for fast trains. Drivers operate with the same reaction times as other train drivers, but “the safety system is less forgiving.”
Yet rail travel remains one of the world’s safest forms of transport with far fewer major accidents and fatalities than road use. High-speed rail travel is even safer, largely because of the intensive work that goes into building systems that allow trains to move at such impressive velocity.
Feat of engineering
A typical high-speed train, weighing nearly 500 tons, is a remarkable feat of engineering. Compact motors deliver around 11,000 horsepower — roughly the equivalent of 100 family cars — alongside multiple power and braking systems. Add 500-600 seats, a café car, heating, ventilation and lighting and countless other components, all kept within strict weight limits, and you have something more akin to a Formula 1 car on rails than a commuter train. It’s no surprise each unit costs about $40 million to build, with millions more spent on maintenance over a typical lifespan.
But high-speed rail has become so commonplace in Europe and Asia since the 1980s that many passengers barely notice it. While people answer emails, watch movies or listen to podcasts, few give a thought to the army of engineers, technicians and maintenance crews who keep these trains safe and on time.
That predictability is part of the appeal. More than 10 billion passengers have traveled on Japan’s Shinkansen since 1964, and the network’s drama-free punctuality has become a quiet part of daily life for millions.
France followed with its iconic Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) in 1981. The TGV slashed journey times between major cities and helped make high-speed travel safe, accessible and affordable; France’s expertise also spread to Spain, Belgium, South Korea, the United Kingdom and Morocco, home to Africa’s first high-speed line.
More than 2.5 billion riders a year now travel on services operating at 150 mph or more, according to the International Union of Railways. A single high-speed line can move more than 20,000 people per hour in each direction. Even as Covid-19 disrupted global travel, the length of operational high-speed lines jumped by 40% between 2020 and 2022, from 27,300 to 36,58