8 seconds

japan rail recently did an audit of the punctuality of its shinkansen (bullet trains) - the ones that run the length and breadth of the country. it found after examining 160,000 individual train journeys, that the average delay in arrival for a shinkansen was 8 seconds.

.

.
8 seconds?! can you imagine if such rampant punctuality was introduced into australia? people would go wild - run screaming from train stations frothing at the mouth. attendants would tell you that the train was coming in 5 minutes whilst looking you right in the eye. the loudspeakers would announce: "good afternoon passengers: the train to dandenong has been delayed, and is now expected in 8 seconds. connex apologises for any inconvenience caused". it would all be too much.
.

.
but not in japan. if you catch a train 6 hours up the east coast and have only 3 minutes to change over to another train upon arrival, there's no more shitting yourself with fear that you won't make the connection - you can sit back and relax with the knowledge wthat you will have a full 180 seconds to change at the station.
.

.
in fact, when travelling on local trains, you can go to the front carriage and gaze through the window at the driver with all the other window lickers (or did pottsie say that they were headbangers? i was too busy drooling on the plexiglass for it to register). these drivers (who all have autistic spectrum disorder) have a timetable (see the arrow on the photo above!), and this timetable tells them what time they need to arrive and leave each train station to the second. fetch the smelling salts!
.

.
the shinkansen themselves are just awesome. on our first ride, i looked out the window at the blurred vegetation by the tracks, and felt like i was in free-fall - SIDEWAYS. in fact, when i later googled it, i found that the trains do indeed travel faster than the terminal velocity of a human being - still alive, but bound and gagged - who has been tossed into the sky over bass strait from an unidentified aeroplane. it was fast.
.

.
the seats were a blessing too. with my buggered back, we couldn't have spent a lot of time on a train with normal seats - but in japan, even the dregs of society (like us) travel first class when they're travelling last class, as all seats recline to about 45 degrees.
.

.
it meant that we could literally leave tokyo in the morning, pop over to a mid-western japanese city for a bit of breakfast and sightseeing, move on somewhere else for a late afternoon stretch in a world heritage garden, and then get back on the train and be home in tokyo for dinner with my sister. and that's exactly the sort of thing we did and the sort of thing you can do when you free-fall toward your destinations.
.

.
special mention must be made of the JR pass - one of the worlds true travel bargains. for an amount that initially seems extortional, g and i bought three weeks of limitless travel on almost all the trains in japan - from metros to local lines to the glorious shinkansen. i reckon we saved about $1000 each as a result. cha-ching.
.