An Accelerated History of Fast and Dirty Trains
// Since the first passenger train ran on a track in northern England, two hundred years ago this September, a kind of mainline of progress in passenger rail has gradually established itself. The global standard now involves lightweight high-speed trains, drawing power from overhead wires, hitting a minimum of 250 km/h, and running on electricity (ideally generated by hydro, solar, wind, and other renewable sources). But the process was hardly a straight-ahead, linear one; as historians of technology will tell you, it never is. If you take a gander to your left and right as we cruise along that mainline, you'll see some intriguing hulks rusting on the sidings.
Steam, generated by burning coal, was the original motive force for locomotives. Steam trains were big, dirty, and wildly picturesque, but for all their power, they were never all that fast. (The all-time world speed record for a steam loco was set by the North Eastern Railway's absolutely gorgeous Mallard, below, which hit 202.8 km/h somewhere between Grantham and Peterborough on July 3, 1938.) They also required far more personnel to keep running, from the fireman who rode along with the conductor to the maintenance crew that cleaned and oiled them between runs.
Ah, but there was always that energy-rich black goo, petroleum. The Germans were the first to regularly run diesel-powered passenger trains. Like Fascist Italy, Germany in the 1930s wanted to wow the world with its technological prowess. While Mussolini favored electric-powered direttissime, Hitler's Reichsbahn introduced the Fliegende Hamburger in 1933, whose Zeppelin-shaped locomotive averaged 121 km/h between Berlin and Hamburg. (Please excuse a technical aside: these German trains were in fact railcars—that is, self-propelled coaches with a driver's cab at the end, as opposed to locomotives, which are self-contained motor units that pull, or push, a train's freight cars or passenger coaches.) As a mature individual, I am proud to say I avoided chuckling as the image of Big Mac being lofted into the air appeared in my mind. But the fact that the Hamburger was followed by the Fliegende Frankfurter (the "Flying Frankfurter"), which averaged 132 km/h on its way to Frankfurt—c'mon, I can't resist: LOL.
The problem with petroleum, of course, is that it often comes from far away, from territories you don't control, and it often gets prohibitively expensive, as the Axis powers discovered in the 1940s.
