Tokaido Shinkansen
high-speed railway line in Japan servicing between Tokyo and Shin-Ōsaka (through to Hakata) stations
The Tokaido Shinkansen (Japanese: 東海道新幹線; lit. 'Eastern Sea Route new trunk line') is a Japanese high-speed rail line between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka. It is part of the nationwide Shinkansen network and, with the San'yō Shinkansen, forms a continuous high-speed corridor through the Taiheiyō Belt. The line is owned and operated by the Central Japan Railway Company (JR Central).
Opened on October 1, 1964, shortly before the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, it was the first railway in the world built for regular operation at speeds above 200 km/h (120 mph) and became the model for later high-speed rail systems. Operation passed from Japanese National Railways (JNR) to JR Central when JNR was privatized in 1987.
Three service types operate: the fastest Nozomi, the limited-stop Hikari, and the all-stations Kodama. Many Nozomi and Hikari trains continue west over the San'yō Shinkansen, some as far as Hakata. All passenger trains are 16-car electric multiple units, and the maximum operating speed is 285 km/h (177 mph). The fastest Tokyo–Shin-Osaka journey takes 2 hours 21 minutes.
The Tokaido Shinkansen is one of the world's most intensively used high-speed lines.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Tokaido Shinkansen” as high-speed railway line in Japan servicing between Tokyo and Shin-Ōsaka (through to Hakata) stations. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q660895. VIAF identifies the subject as 146814565. The Library of Congress control number is sh2016001790. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tokaido Shinkansen” 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.