When something goes wrong at 186 mph: Inside the fast-reaction world of high-speed train drivers

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 36,580 miles — most of it in China.

Punishing speeds

Many high-speed trains — including the TGV and Shinkansen — cruise at up to 186 mph, roughly 300 kilometers per hour. China’s Fuxing trains go even faster, reaching 217 mph on some routes, with plans to push up to 248 mph. Japan’s next-generation ALFA-X is being tested at similar speeds, though its planned service pace will be closer to 225 mph.

Such speed is punishing: The forces exerted on bodies, wheels, suspension, brakes and track components are intense. Few high-speed trains last beyond their 25th birthday; millions of miles at full tilt take their toll.

Every element of a high-speed system must work as part of a finely tuned ecosystem. Rails, bridges, tunnels and power lines all face extraordinary stresses, requiring exacting construction, meticulous inspections and continual upkeep.

Above roughly 125 mph, lineside signals are no longer visible enough for safe reaction, so operators use in-cab systems that provide continuous updates on speed limits and track conditions. This lets drivers focus on what’s coming far ahead — essential when every second counts.

Average reaction times for car drivers are said to be between 0.7–1.5 seconds. Years of intensive professional training can reduce train driver reaction times to 0.2–0.4 seconds, although fatigue and distractions still matter. These reflexes, paired with sophisticated safety systems, help make high-speed rail one of the world’s safest forms of transport.

“Driving at high-speed is also about ‘thinking ahead’ more — there are longer intervals between stations, but due to the higher speeds we have to be more aware of what could happen further away — which can mean a higher level of situational awareness,” Cooper adds.

“Higher speeds also introduce risks during exceptional events; however additional training means there’s a level of understanding and knowledge of emergency procedures that are sometimes very different to the conventional network.”

Any engineer will tell you accelerating a 500-ton train to 186 mph is the easy bit. Stopping safely is the real challenge.

Modern high-speed trains use multiple braking systems. On top of disc brakes at the axles, many employ regenerative braking, which converts kinetic energy into electricity that feeds back into the power grid or can be used by other trains. Some also have powerful electromagnetic track brakes that clamp onto the rails in an emergency.

A TGV or Eurostar at 186 mph can come to a stand in about 83 seconds, covering roughly 1.5-2 miles. On the UK’s HS1 line, a 12-car commuter train takes about 45 seconds to stop from 140 mph, covering just under a mile.

‘Peopleless’ railways

Safety systems have been developed to deliver essential information to driver control desks. The European Rail Traffic Management System, now rolling out across the continent and beyond, gives them real-time target speeds, illustrations of braking curves and line status information many miles ahead, allowing for smoother, safer and more energy-efficient operations.

Because high-speed lines run at such frequencies and speeds, additional precautions are built in. Grade-crossing intersections with roads — a significant hazard on conventional railways — are not permitted. “Flying junctions” using elevated tracks and separated routes are used to avoid the conflicting movements where lines separate or join. Fencing, sensors and CCTV keep operational areas isolated.

“From an infrastructure point of view a dedicated high-speed railway is easier to isolate from surrounding areas and external hazards,” says Cooper.

“As well as greater use of elevated tracks and tunnels, there are multiple layers of fencing, sensors and CCTV. This means that, unlike on conventional lines, trespass incidents are very rare. In the case of HS1 it’s a ‘peopleless’ railway, meaning trackworkers do not venture into the operational areas of the railway while trains are running, limiting risk of injury or fatalities.”

That isolation contributes to high-speed rail’s remarkable safety record — and helps explain why the recent Spanish crash in Andalusia, which killed 43 people, sent shockwaves through the rail community.

Since the first Shinkansen trains ran out of Tokyo Station in 1964, Japan has not recorded a single fatality on its bullet trains. France has recorded just one fatal TGV accident — a derailment of a non-public test train in 2015.

Accidents remain exceptionally rare on dedicated high-speed tracks.

China’s ambitious network — now more than 31,000 miles long — has had its own tragedy: in 2011 a collision near the coastal city of Wenzhou killed 40 passengers and injured nearly 200. The disaster shook public confidence, led to speed reductions and temporarily paused construction on new lines, but no major incidents have been reported in the 15 years since, even as the network has continued to expand.

“High Speed rail’s incredible safety record is built on many factors; it uses cutting-edge technology and materials, sets world-leading standards for fire resistance, crash protection and signalling equipment,” said rail historian Christian Wolmar, author of “Fast Track: The Extraordinary Story of High-Speed Rail.”

“But its biggest advantage is that it uses dedicated tracks which make collisions with conflicting or slower-moving trains much more unlikely.

The safe alternative to flying

However, he says, with more than 70 million high-speed journeys operated each year across the world, the circumstances that caused a crash like the incident in Spain were perhaps inevitable at some point.

Investigators are still working to determine the cause of the January 18 derailment. Early suspicions focus on a possible broken rail — something high-speed maintenance regimes are specifically designed to prevent.

The country’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente described the incident as “extremely strange.” And while it’s too early to determine any lessons from the crash, Wolmar says these are likely to be basic — like the need for more frequent inspections.

“Whatever precautions are taken, however safe the trains are, external factors such as weather or subsidence or sheer bad luck can never be entirely discounted,” he adds.

Spain now operates Europe’s longest high-speed network, at 2,469 miles, second only to China. Europe aims to triple high-speed rail use by 2050 — a hugely ambitious target that will require massive and sustained expansion.

For now, millions of passengers continue to rely on the unseen armies of drivers, engineers and technicians who keep high-speed railways running safely. Until proven otherwise, high-speed rail remains the safest, most effective alternative to flying for journeys up to 700 miles, moving large numbers of people from city center to city center with speed, convenience and minimal hassle.

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