[Combwork]

[QUOTE=BlueStreak;54621]You know we once had a great passenger rail system, don't you? The automotive industry deliberately killed it, so they could sell more cars. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, GM and Ford bought up passenger railroads just to shut them down and scrap them. Nice, Huh?

Same thing happened here. In 1948 the U.K. rail system; track, rolling stock, everything was nationalised. In the 1950's/60's transport minister Ernest Marples (who purely by coincidence had family interests in one of the major road building companies in the U.K.) along with Richard Beeching (chairman of British Railways) closed down as many rail lines as they could get away with, and those they couldn't were deliberately underfunded so they could not develop. Now the railways have been privatised again but not the track. That all belongs to railtrack. Kind of makes sense; they maintain the rail network and charge the train companies to use it.

Now it's proposed we spend millions of £ (possibly billions; no fixed price has been given.) over 15 years to upgrade some mainline rails so trains can run at best about two thirds of what the Chinese are already doing. Their high speed rail system already covers the 1,318 kilometers (over 800 miles) between Beijing and Shanghai at a maximum running speed of 380 kilometers per hour (230 miles per hour). By 2020, at an estimated cost of $300 billion, they're aiming for a total of 25000 kilometers of high speed rail. Using magnetic levitation (no rails so technically not a railway) they've a line that from start to stop reaches 268 miles per hour and covers the 19 miles from Shanghai to the airport in just over 7 minutes. Wonderful irony. We show the Chinese how to build a railway then they show us how it should be done.

Brunell was right. If the 7ft broad gauge used on the Great Western Railway had become universal, fast comfortable spacious rail travel would never have fallen out of fashion. Contemporary reports said that the trains didn't rock, and ran quieter than companies using standard (4ft 8.5 inches) gauge.