There are some lines that were originally built as regular narrow gauge railways and later converted to standard gauge supporting Shinkansen trainsets.

This is called Mini-Shinkansen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Shinkansen

This comes with limitations, as the maximum track speed on these converted lines is apparently around 130 km/h.

None of the actual Shinkansen stadard lines have level crossings.

The answer was almost certainly generated by an LLM.

"thing; thing, Japan" is a meme for a reason. I was wondering how long it would take to appear in this thread.

That's nitpicking, IMO. It's still 99% true. There are just two "Mini-Shinkansen" lines, they only run once or twice per hour, are shorter than non-Mini-Shinkansen, and only a relatively short part (distance-wise) of their journey is spent on the slow tracks. There are non-Shinkansen trains on the Mini-Shinkansen portion of their journey, but not very many. (Also the word "shinkansen" implies new tracks.)

> France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.

At least in France, high speed trains on older tracks won't go as fast as on the dedicated high speed tracks

> Short answer: Japan treats high-speed rail as a tightly controlled system, not just fast trains on tracks.

Is exactly what a text bot would say. Eloquent, but when you think about it, is just nonsense. Which operator treats HSR as "fast trains on tracks" and which does not treat it is a "tightly controlled system"?

> It added that three trains that had gone over the tracks at 17:21 on Sunday, 19:01 and then 19:09 had similar notches "with a compatible geometric pattern".

Then the crashed train passed at 19:45.

I don't see why an overnight inspection must have caught this, it could have happened just before the 17:21 train, or even have been caused by it.

We will need to wait for the investigation to continue, and I hope Japan's rail people will not be so arrogant as to assume they can't learn something from it.

I have lived in Spain for the last two years and observed the luck of maintenance in a lot of things.

For example, people typically pay for house/apartment insurance. But insurance companies never send a person to check for things like leaking pipes or whatever. Rather they simply wait until an accident happens and dispatch an emergency crew and cover a lot of damage that could be easily prevented. Then people tolerate non-trivial damage to homes/apartments like leaky roof not reporting it to insurance companies for weeks.

Then with cars people often do not follow the maintenance schedule and insurance companies do not ask for that. Typically people drive until damage happens due to a minor accident or maintenance are forced by state required technical inspection once in few years. The car companies even offer free maintenance checks as a part of guarantee but people skip even that.

Yet when someone spends efforts to complain, thinks do gets done. For example there a city service to remove graffiti on public areas. If one files a complain, they react and remove the graffiti. However sometimes one needs to send a complain twice.

For context: the aforementioned crash in Japan was not on a high-speed / Shinkansen line but a normal commuter train. Both the 2013 accident in Spain and the recent one were high speed trains.

I’m not sure these are comparable, high-speed rail needs much tighter tolerances as the risk is orders of magnitude higher. As the parent comment stated there have been zero major crashes on the japanese shinkansen lines.

> That might be because Japan did have a huge railway accident in 2005 due to excessive speed.

No, Japan more or less invented ATC in the 1960s for the purpose of running the Shinkansen safely.

ATC stops the train - this is actually an important plot point in both "shinaksen explosion" movies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bullet_Train

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Train_Explosion

In the movies terrorists place a bomb on board and the train crew has to maintain a minimum speed or the bomb explodes (this is where that american movie with a bus got the idea). And they have to manipulate the ATC or else it will stop the train when they enter sections of the track with lower minimum speed, or else ATC stops the train and the bomb explodes.

I'm curious what scenarios your imagining. Because I can't think of a single situation where a track limit should not be applied automatically, at least to trains with passengers on them.