Hideo Shima

Hideo Shima was the chief engineer of the Shinkansen, the first high-speed railway in the world, and resigned before it opened. Born in Osaka in 1901, the son of a railway engineer, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in mechanical engineering and joined the Japanese Government Railways in 1925. He worked on steam locomotive design for two decades, and in 1951 resigned as a matter of responsibility after the Sakuragicho fire, in which a train's wiring ignited and more than a hundred passengers died in carriages whose doors could not be opened. He was brought back in 1955 as chief engineer of Japanese National Railways under president Shinji Sogo, and the two committed to a new line between Tokyo and Osaka. Almost every element of it broke with practice. The line used standard gauge rather than Japan's narrow gauge, so it needed an entirely separate right of way. It avoided level crossings completely and used gentle curves. Power was distributed across motors in every carriage rather than concentrated in a locomotive, which spread axle load, improved acceleration and let the trains climb gradients — a decision drawn from Shima's aeronautical thinking, along with the sealed pressurised body and the aerodynamic nose. Sogo and Shima obtained a World Bank loan partly by understating the projected cost, on the reasoning that the project would never be authorised at its real price. When the overrun became public in 1963 both resigned. The Tokaido Shinkansen opened on 1 October 1964, days before the Tokyo Olympics, running at 210 kilometres an hour. It has never had a passenger fatality from a derailment or collision. He later headed Japan's space agency and died in 1998.

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