BBC Documentary: Bullet Train - Richard Hammond’s Engineering Connections

Richard Hammond reveals the surprising engineering connections between Japan’s Bullet Train, the world’s first high-speed train, and ancient charioteers, a crowbar, a medieval clock, the electric telegraph and a 19th-century luxury racing car. Nearly fifty years old, the Bullet Train is still pioneering new high-speed technology. Richard builds his own train to show how engineers reinvented the train wheel to prevent it violently shaking at its top speeds of close to 200mph (300kph). Things start to heat up when he visits a high voltage lab to find out how engineers eliminated the danger of 10,000 degree electrical arcs by devising an ingeniously levered pantograph - the connection between the train and the overhead power lines. They also made the train light to maximise acceleration, but as Richard finds out on a skid pan, this created a slippery problem only solved thanks to the world’s first four-wheel-drive car - the Lohner Porsche. Obviously, four driven wheels were not enough for a Bullet Train, so engineers made it a 112-wheel-drive. At such incredible speeds it is hard to stay on track when going round bends. Richard charges off in a carriage to see how the ancient charioteers did it, and how the Bullet Train uses the same principle of leaning into bends. Not only is the track banked, but the train itself leans. Finally, using a cubed car and a lake, Richard learns how the electric telegraph is the key to keeping the Bullet Train safe in a country hit by 1,500 earthquakes a year. The Bullet Train is protected by the world’s most sophisticated earthquake detection system, which can stop trains automatically within seconds to avoid high-speed derailment.