At 357mph, it was impossible to focus on anything within a mile of the train.
Even distant hilltop villages flashed past in a second.
The sense of flying across the landscape of the Champagne region was
accentuated by being on the top deck of the TGV train.
Engineers had laboured for months to ensure precision to the millimetre in the
track geometry, but we still lurched alarmingly. The train seemed to rise
from the tracks for one terrifying moment.
We were traveling twice as fast as a passenger jet at the point of take-off,
but there were no seatbelts. At that speed, they wouldn’t have saved us
anyway.
As the only British journalist on board, I was determined not to show how
frightened I was. The assembled French media, politicians and rail bosses
seemed to love every second and showed no trace of fear. But then they have
absolute faith in the safety of their high-speed lines, with no passenger
fatalities in 26 years of operation. I have reported on six crashes that
have caused a total 60 deaths on Britain’s so-called fast lines in the past
decade and none of the trains was travelling at faster than 125mph.
The most disturbing feature of this journey was not knowing how fast we would
go. There had been rumors that the French would try to exceed the 361mph
that was achieved by a magnetically levitated Japanese train. But the maglev
floats above its concrete guide-way and is far smoother and quieter than
wheels on rails.
The speed was displayed in kilometres per hour on screens above our heads and
there were cheers as we broke 500km/h (310mph). The cheers grew louder as we
edged past the world rail-speed record, set by a TGV in 1990, of 515.3km/h.
Then an extra surge pushed us up to 570km/h. We hovered around that speed
for about two minutes as the driver seemed to seek one final burst of
acceleration.
The article below was clipped from travel.timesonline.co.uk. Click the link to read the rest of the article. 
clipped from travel.timesonline.co.uk
Comments