Bullet trains have computer faultFaster, faster pussycatBy Nick Farrell: Wednesday 23 March 2005, 07:32JR TOKAI Railway has admitted that there is a computer glitch in its computer system that makes some of its bullet trains exceed their speed limit.According to the Japanese newspaper Kudo, the bullet train’s computer system has developed trouble at least 52 times since the beginning of March on the Tokaido Shinkansen Line.This has resulted in the trains going faster than 270kph an hour and in one case a train got to 280 km per hour and was blue shifted into a temporal vortex (we made the last bit up).While British train users might dream of reaching a blistering 100kph if their trains are going downhill and are assisted by wind, it is clear that JR Tokai haa taken a leaf out of the UK’s book on the excuse front.The official reason for the problem is ‘heavy rain’ or ‘snow on the line’.This apparently tiggers the sensors on the track and feeds the wrong telemetry into the computer system. This resulted in a driver’s speedo reading that the train was going slower. There is no indication as to what happens if the train went lower than 50mph.And the company responsible for creating the hardware and software for the train that can't handle Japanese snow? – come on down Toshiba who installed the system in June 2003.More speed and train spotting here.
