Trains lost their luster after World War II, when federal legislation favored private cars and commercial jets. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a Federal-Aid Highway Act that committed $25 billion to building expressways for economic growth and national defense. In 1958, Congress passed legislation that created the Federal Aviation Administration to promote safer, more efficient flight at speeds no train could match.
But as train ridership dwindled at home, a rail revolution was fomenting abroad thanks to post-war reconstruction efforts underwritten by loans from the new World Bank. In 1964, Japanese National Railways began firing bubble-nosed electric trains over the Tokaido Shinkansen Line at 130 miles per hour. To Americans tuning into the Tokyo Summer Olympics, footage of bullet trains racing past Mount Fuji came as a revelation—a zero-altitude Sputnik moment that made many rethink the future of domestic transportation.
In 1965, Congress passed the High-Speed Ground Transportation Act, authorizing the Secretary of Commerce to research new “materials, aerodynamics, vehicle propulsion, vehicle control, communications, and guide-ways” that might bring Japanese-style advances to America. At the signing ceremony, President Lyndon Johnson marveled that “an astronaut can orbit the earth faster than a man on the ground can get from New York to Washington,” and promised to make public transit a “better servant of our people.”
To appease fiscal conservatives opposed to transportation budget increases, Johnson said that the Department of Commerce would work “in cooperation with private industry” to develop train designs at “no cost to the Government.” While this approach limited spending, it did not adequately account for the fact that fast trains needed dedicated tracks, welded rails, and new electrical power systems to tap their full potential. Without these improvements, America’s bullet trains would languish on the northeast corridor, an antiquated rail line already congested with freight and commuter traffic.
Instead of overhauling the corridor, the Ground Transportation Act funded two splashy demonstration projects. The first project resulted in a gasoline-powered Shinkansen look-alike called the TurboTrain. Engineered by the United Aircraft Company (UAC) and named after the Latin word for tornado, the TurboTrain employed the same Pratt and Whitney turbine technology that lifted planes and helicopters. On Dec. 20, 1967, a test Turbo whipped through Princeton Junction at 170.8 miles per hour, setting a North American rail speed record that still stands today.