I wish I had more details, but the best I can say is they just built the damn thing without dithering. Construction began in 1959 and was completed in 1964, with service beginning the same year.
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A lot of the planning about where it would go was settled long before they started building--the entire Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansen routes were initially conceived in the 1940s, to be built for steam engines. The project couldn't be built while the war was raging...
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...and immediately after the war, there were far more important concerns than a railway that would pretty much just duplicate the existing main lines. But once the dust had settled and business had picked up again, the project came back up to increase capacity on the main lines
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The route had been determined decades earlier, and some preliminary tunnel work had been done--there was still a lot of land acquisition needed to give the railways ownership of the proposed route, and the vast majority of the route hadn't had any work done yet...
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...but somehow, all of that was taken care of in the 5 years of construction.
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One thing they have in common with Cali tho is that the initial projected cost was off by 50%. JNR president Sogo had said it could be done for 200 billion yen, but it cost 400 billion, so he resigned in 1963 to take responsibility (& wasn't invited to the opening ceremony iirc)
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According to a biography, Sogo knew perfectly well that he was lowballing the cost; popular sentiment at the time was that trains would soon be obsolete, so he feared that if the price was too high, the project would never be approved
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Fortunately the risk was worth it; the Shinkansen was an instant success and a crucial moneymaker for Japan National Railways at a time when they were financially struggling...the Shinkansen paid its construction costs w interest, then later its revenue was applied to JNR debts
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Replying to @380kmh
How well do you expect the Cali bullet train to do, whenever they do get it finished?
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Replying to @Octapode
If they built a bullet train on the route they propose and operated it with the same standards they use in Japan (very frequent trains, mixed stopping patterns, etc), I would expect it to be very successful and popular--but I'm skeptical that they'll even finish rn...
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...and I'm not convinced that the incompetence we're seeing now will just vanish when it switches from construction to operation. Texas will definitely get their HSR before Cali, and theirs will be operated by a division of JR Central, so I trust it will be well-run.
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