Peter's Japan blog

When you go to Japan, it is a must that you take the Shinkansen at least 1 time. This train is comfortable like business class and very fast too. People from Europe can compare it with the TGV/Eurostar/Thalys, but the Shinkansens look cooler ;p.
But I've really begun to admire the amazing feats that the Japanese have done for the Shinkansen lines. Yesterday I followed the San-yo Shinkansen line from Osaka to Hakata (from central Japan to West-Japan) on Google Earth and I was totally amazed. The first Shinkansen line was made from Tokyo to Osaka in the 1960s (the Tokaido Shinkansen), but the the extension to Hakata came in the early 1970s.
The route from Tokyo to Osaka doesn't have many mountains so they took the shortest route along major cities. Already on this route many of the tracks for the Shinkansen are laid on bridges, over land, water and cities. (the Japanese really know how to build bridges, as they really build almost every train line on bridges or underground).
But the route for the San-yo Shinkansen to Hakata is truly amazing. They litterally took the shortest route between major cities along the way while also avoiding putting track in dense residential areas. But this route means going through many many mountains, as this part of Japan has quite a lot of mountains. This means building many long tunnels and more bridges in between. This must have been an engineers dream and hell to accomplish this extraordinary feat. Oh, and the route is about 600km long. The total route from Tokyo to Hakata is almost 1200km which can be done at the fastest in 5 hours using the Nozomi service, which stops at the least number of stations. But the Nozomi is of course the most expensive one, and not covered by the Japan Rail Pass. They can only take the Hikari or Kodama (which stops in every station) service. Only the Nozomi does the whole route from Tokyo to Hakata without transfer to another service.

A "300 Series" and a "700 Series" Shinkansen at Tokyo Station (picture taken from wikipedia):