When was the first bullet train built?
Shinkansen
The Tōkaidō Shinkansen began service on 1 October 1964, in time for the first Tokyo Olympics.[17] The conventional Limited Express service took six hours and 40 minutes from Tokyo to Osaka, but the Shinkansen made the trip in just four hours, shortened to three hours and ten minutes by 1965. It enabled day trips between Tokyo and Osaka, the two largest metropolises in Japan, changed the style of business and life of the Japanese people significantly, and increased new traffic demand. The service was an immediate success, reaching the 100million passenger mark in less than three years on 13 July 1967, and one billion passengers in 1976. Sixteen-car trains were introduced for Expo '70 in Osaka. With an average of 23,000 passengers per hour in each direction in 1992, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen was the world's busiest high-speed rail line.[18] As of 2014, the train's 50th anniversary, daily passenger traffic had risen to 391,000 which, spread out over its 18-hour schedule, represented an average of just under 22,000 passengers an hour.[19]
Bullet (interurban)
The P&W was originally conceived to be a Class I railroad which would compete for east-west traffic with the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad. Already in 1907, the P&W had laid trackage with a quality never seen before by an interurban – free from grade crossings with both railroads and roads, and with a color-light block signal system, like most Class I railroads of the day. Nearly the entire line was double track to improve safety and capacity (the deadliest interurban wrecks were caused by head-on collisions). To further utilize the Bullets' potential, more improvements were made to track and signal systems to permit extremely high speeds on the Norristown line.