Well I was talking about regular trains, not world speed record attempts. BTW as for World Rail Speed Records AFAIK the current one is something over 550kph (346mph). But that was an electric mag-lev train. And anyway that record you mention beat the American set one (126) from the year before (1938), only the American locomotive was put back into regular service.
There is not much use in being a rail-fan in the US today we are not even developing the technology. We basically use RR's as freight conveyor belts. -graywolf John Francis wrote: > On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 05:47:36PM -0500, graywolf wrote: >> You are saying that 50 years later, diesel trains are faster than steam >> trains were? Actually, I think the US had the fastest steam trains in >> the world. > > Nope. World record for steam was 129mph, set by a Gresley A4 Pacific > named Mallard a year or so before the outbreak of WW II. The engine > (which was never the same afterwards) can be seen in the National > Railway Museum in York. That's York in the UK, not Pennsylvania :-) > > Nowadays, as others have pointed out, Inter-City trains regularly > exceed that speed, cruising in the 135-150mph range. And there's > also the Eurostar which exceeds that speed (although not in the UK, > unless they've finished the track upgrade since I was last there), > and the TGV service in France. > > Some colleagues of mine have recently been on a trip to China, > where they rode the maglev train at speeds over twice that 129mph! > > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
