Higher-speed rail
type of railway with speeds approaching but less than such of true high-speed rail
Higher-speed rail (HrSR) is used to describe inter-city passenger rail services that have top speeds higher than conventional rail but not fast enough to be called high-speed rail services. The term is also used by planners to identify the incremental rail improvements to increase train speeds and reduce travel time as alternatives to larger efforts to create or expand the high-speed rail networks.
Though the definition of higher-speed rail varies from country to country, most countries use the term to refer to rail services operating at speeds of up to 200 km/h (125 mph).
The concept is usually viewed as stemming from efforts to upgrade a legacy railway line to high speed railway standards (speeds in excess of 250 km/h or 155 mph), but usually falling short on the intended speeds. The faster speeds are achieved through various means including new rolling stock such as tilting trains, upgrades to tracks including shallower curves, electrification, in-cab signalling, and less frequent halts/stops.
Definitions by country
As with the definitions of high-speed rail, the definition varies by country. The term has been used by government agencies, government officials, transportation planners, academia, the rail industry, and the media, but sometimes with overlaps in the speed definitions. Some countries with an established definition of higher-speed rail include:
In Canada, according to the Surface Transportation Policy, Department of Transport, the speed range for higher-speed rail is between 160 and 240 km/h (100 and 150 mph).
In India, according to the Ministry of Railways, the speed range for India's higher-speed rail will be between 160 and 200 km/h (100 and 125 mph).
In the United Kingdom, the term higher-speed rail is used for upgraded tracks with train speeds up to 125 mph (200 km/h)
In the United States, the term "higher-speed rail", as opposed to "high-speed rail", is used by regional planners in many U.S. states to describe inter-city passenger rail services with top speeds of between 90 mph (145 km/h) and 110 mph (175 km/h).
“Higher-speed rail” enters the record as type of railway with speeds approaching but less than such of true high-speed rail. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Higher-speed, rail and type can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4422352. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Higher-speed rail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.