All aboard!

HOW DO YOU TRANSPORT a train from the factory to its depot? If it’s the latest version of the Shinkansen bullet train, you send it by ship.

The photo shows the newest model of the Shinkansen’s lead car being loaded on a barge at the Kobe plant of Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which manufactured it. The car will be used on the direct run from Osaka to Kagoshima when the first leg of the Kyushu route on the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands begins service in the spring of 2011. (For some reason, the system has been partially opened at the southernmost end of Kyushu from Yatsushiro, Kumamoto, to Kagoshima.)

After arriving at the JR West storage area in Fukuoka, it will be connected to eight other cars assembled at a different plant for trials scheduled to begin at the end of the month and last until next spring. Mass production will begin after the results of those trials are reviewed.

The train will cover the 900-kilometer distance (about 560 miles) from Osaka to Kagoshima in roughly four hours. When they say four hours, they mean it—in 2003, the Shinkansen’s average actual arrival time was within six seconds of the scheduled time.

And since the only fatality on the 40-year history of the line occurred when a door closed on a passenger, it’ll get you there in one piece, too!