That’s 547.8 kph, and it’s a record speed for rail travel. (A Japanese “non-conventional magnetically levitated” train hit 361 mph in 2003.) Ingrid Rousseau was on the 25,000-horsepower V150 in France yesterday, and she filed a report about the speed trial. 

The speedometer climbed higher and higher—and so did my heart rate. Inside the last of three double-decker cars sandwiched between two engines, those of us aboard the French bullet train trying to set the speed record on conventional rails watched the digital numbers flash on a screen in kilometers per hour: 400, 450, 500, 550.

Looking out the windows, the French countryside became a green blur.

The air pressure, she adds, made her ears ache.

In other high-speed train news, Rousseau writes that “China plans to build more than 7,500 miles of high-speed railways in coming years at a cost of more than $250 billion. Construction is to start this year on a high-speed line between Beijing and Shanghai cutting travel time from nine hours to five.”

Now if we could just get the U.S. to start building a network, too.

* Update: In other news on the high-speed train front, Fabian Nuñez, speaker of the state Assembly in California, is now in France to study its rail system. He told the AP: “We are contemplating in California the possibility of a high speed train that would go from the San Francisco Bay area to Los Angeles and San Diego, in South California.”

We wish him luck.

Related on World Hum:
* The Derailing of America’s Rail Service
* A Los Angeles-San Francisco Bullet Train?