The limits of high-speed rail
The article is great but it fails to address another main issue with high-speed rail in many locations: Having to network with slower traffic.<p>I recently took a 9.5h train trip from Berlin to Switzerland, and although the train does travel at the top speed of the section at several locations, we never reached the top speed of the train set (280km/h), and lots of times we were travelling at under 100km/h for switching tracks or whatever else. I didn't log it, but I'd guess we spent less than 50% of the travel time over 200km/h.<p>That's where Japan's Shinkansen was so groundbreaking. Sure, they also used this opportunity to migrate from a smaller gauge, but the decision to build a new network from scratch that doesn't interact with other networks at all paid off tenfold over the decades as trains started getting faster and faster.