by ButterflyEffect

Fifty years ago this month, Japan’s bullet trains completed their first trips and were welcomed by hundreds of people who had waited overnight in the terminals. The new high-speed line connected two massive economic hubs, Tokyo and Osaka, cutting the travel time between them from about seven hours to four. The shinkansen, as it’s called in Japanese, has carried roughly 10 billion riders since then, with a pristine record of safety and dependability: There haven’t been any fatal train derailments or collisions, and the average delay is 36 seconds.