Welcome to the super high speed records page! It's always fascinating to see the work done for higher and higher speeds, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. 

We might easily think the need for speed is the ideology of todays generation; wrong. Speed was an issue from the very beginning: to choose the locomotive type for the world's first railway Stockton and Darlington (in Great Britain), a race between the 4 locomotives was arranged and the fastest and most reliable locomotive chosen! Technologies evolved decade after decade with close interest in adding the speed of the operations. 

Another interesting event occurred in Germany as late as in the 1970's: it was thought that the train on normal rails could not safely run faster than little over 200 kph! Although this was probably the result of the Maglev lobby, this also caused the German train industry to be permanently left behind the French, who soon had their TGV's running 275 kph in everyday traffic! This figure was soon raised to 300 kph and currently to 320 kph with next production generation of trains (AGV's) running 360 kph, or in other words, nice round figure of incredible 100 meters per second!  

 The French and German Records
Next we'll go through some of the French and German recods: 

- In 1981 the TGV-PSE like the one below ran incredible speed of 380 kph on the Paris-Sud-Est LGV shown in the picture. Must have been a major embarrassment to the Maglev lobby, a "conventional" train running safely twice as fast as was thought to be possible at the time in Germany...

This was the avakening call for the Germans who gradually perfected their ICE-V (V for Versuch or Trial) train to run faster and faster. In 1988 it was their time to create the new world record of 408,4 kph with the ICE-V test train.  

- In 1990 the French had their next generation of the TGV's the TGV-Atlantique ready and with minor modifications (like added spoilers) a new record of 515,3 kph was set at Vendome France. According to Keith Fender a famous railroad journalist the Germans got the message and the road ahead in speed recods was clear for Alstom (builder of the TGV's and AGV) and the SNCF (French National railways). 

in 2001 a production TGV Reseau run 1067 kilometers non stop at an incredible 3 hours and 29 minutes. Below a picture of a similar unit. 

in 2007 Alstom and the SNCF made the final Record run on the "race-car-built" TGV unit V150, resulting a momentary speed of 574,8 kph, which is clearly the new world record for standard trains. The train had dozens of guests, members of media and engineers aboard to witness the event. The specially built train had extra streamlining, the second pantograph removed, larger than normal wheels, just 3 intermediate double decked coaches, these with 2 powered bogies (unusual for the TGV's) and to finalize the effort the voltage on the overhead line on the LGV-EST was raised to 31 kV insted of the normal 25kV. This record run was widely publicised at the time. For the production runs 400 kph still has to do mainly because of the catenary technique limitations. Maybe the next generation of infrastructure will solve this problem, or the third rail might be introduced...again. The TGV-POS asyncronous motor locomotives below are of the same production batch as the TGV V150 was.  

 The Maglev Records Story
What ever happened to the Maglev then? It still holds the world record of 581 kph for the nonconventional trains, just 5 kilometers away from the TGV V150 but still the standing record. It remains to be seen, how fast the Chinese will test run their Maglev on its 170 kilometer track in a few years time once it's finished. Even in the production run the Maglevs might outrun any conventional train, with very little noise generated. (Actually the issue is not the speed but the compatibility: the concentional trains can run on just about any infrastructure while the maglevs are currently limited to only one line in production in Shanghai! For the moment...).