A British train actually arrived and wasn't late. This is huge news.

Made my day. Late by 15 minutes considered normal with British train system. Average is ~30mins and "apologies for slight delay" is >30mins. Considering that you're paying ~40GBP for peak return ticket to London Euston - that's bad. Especially when you have to stand during peak time or sit on a non-seatable seats, which were not renevew for >10 years.

A few years back I was so frustrated with trains being late, not turning up or skipping my station that I tackled it the hacker news way. I built a Twitter bot that read the live train arrivals / departures data stream and tweet mentioned the train company with details every time a train failed to show up on time. This was accompanied by a website which was collecting the stats and showing graphs of their performance. I think they realised they weren't going to be able to lie on their end of year reports any more, they panicked and tried to invite me in for some kind of tour of their offices. Not long after that they lost their license to operate on that line.

Edit: Here's a tweet from the bot https://twitter.com/fccoff/status/402239733608505344

Europe has had trains travelling at 200mph for three decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV Britain is just way behind, and it's gonna stay that way.

Whyever would you think that? BR had a plan in the 70s, to be ready early 80s, to get a reasonably modern network. We had the East Coast main line that was historically the "record breaking" line, where for some stretches 125mph+ was possible. 4468 Mallard got the steam record on it in 1938 - 126mph! We had some extremely old bits of track too.

So, plan was APT - a 155mph tilting modern electric, and HST - a 125mph diesel for lines that needed uprating or electrification (most of them), only temporarily. Plans for a Channel tunnel were resurrected and agreed. The French SNCF was just getting on with building TGV, with enough funding to build a network fit for purpose.

Thatcher threatened APT with cancellation, so there was a far too early demo, that went infamously poorly. HSTs were rolled out. A year or two later APT was quietly ready for service. Thatcher sold everything to Fiat, complete with patents. That's not the end of that story.

HST is limited to 90 and 110mph across most of the network as it's not up to 125mph. Bits of East Coast can have it run as designed.

Many years later, UK train companies want to buy Pendelino, an Italian tilting train to modernise the network. Pendelino is the descendent of APT we sold off.

West Coast main line - one of Europe's busiest - finally finished upgrade, ready for 150mph Pendelino. Except to HST suitable speeds - 125mph in the 2010s! We now have 150mph capable trains limited to 125mph.

Yep, most definitely gonna stay that way.

The UK has some of the best tech and some of the worst politics in all of Europe.

Considering the talent available, the country really has been badly run to the point of criminality.

Yup, and we keep doing the same things over and over. Like BT being ready for fibre rollout, having invented half the tech, and being required to sell it off to S Korea around 1990. Supposedly so they weren't "unfair" competition to Blueyonder cable TV.

Somewhere through the 60s or 70s we just about completely lost the ability to do national projects, and joined up thinking.

Nor is it speedy on a local scale, the article even admits this route has been done faster in 1977.

I guess that is one way of getting me to read the article :)

Yeah right. I can't even see the MPH. With France just across the channel, it'll sound ridiculous no matter what.

I’m not sure why it’s posted.

However, efforts like this will make people take trains rather than drive. I wish this would happen in the United States.

If trains went 100 miles an hours on average instead of 50, a lot more people would take trains.

Heck, 75 miles an hour on average would be incredible.

Can confirm, the commuter train here runs ~75 mph and is quite popular. Then again, it's competing with 70mph highway.

I have looked into taking Amtrak several times, but it takes 2-3x as long as driving, 5-10x as long as flying, is more expensive than both, and has far fewer destinations. It's a hard sell for anything other than taking a train for the experience or short distances. Trains should be cheaper than airplanes and faster than cars, but they're neither in the US...

Yes I've often wondered why trains are so expensive compared to airplanes as well. We have a him but it's literally cheaper and faster to fly and that makes no sense.

Where are you getting these amazing 50MPH trains? Do they run on some new type of magic energy source? We're lucky when they break 30MPH here. It takes longer to take the train than to sit in bumper to bumper traffic.

Not speedy even if you go back ~ 90 years ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schienenzeppelin