from the WSJ:
Japan’s bullet trains have been famed for decades. But the ultra-high-speed network doesn’t quite cover the entire country. Yet.
From this Saturday, a new class of “Hayabusa” trains will come into service on the high-speed Tohoku shinkansen route between Tokyo and Aomori, a remote and lightly populated rural prefecture on the northern tip of Japan’s main island.
With its long snout and a vibrant metallic color scheme that could have been inspired by 1980s skiwear, Hayabusa (meaning falcon in Japanese) has been hard to miss around Tokyo in recent months thanks to a vigorous poster campaign from the East Japan Railway Co. (JR East), complete with the grammatically suspect slogan “Made in Dream.”
The new trains will initially run at up to 300 kilometers per hour, the same speed as the older N700 series on the densely populated Tokaido route connecting Tokyo to Osaka, covering the 675 km stretch between the capital and a brand new station just outside Aomori City in three hours and 10 minutes (compared with the current 3 hours and 23 minutes). But from 2012, the training wheels will come off: Hayabusa will become Japan’s fastest train with speeds of up to 320 km/h. .............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2011/03/03/dream-bullet-train-reaches-aomori/