High-speed railway. Effect of previous successful designers

The paper examines the origins of scientific and engineering approaches to design and construction of public railways in the 19th century. The underdeveloped engineering and technologies of the time severely constrained the aspirations of designers and builders to reduce the length of the railway route. The high-speed railways (HSR) that began to be built in the 1960s were created in new engineering and technological conditions. The paper compares the characteristics of a number of railways built in the 19th century and high-speed railways of the 20th century. Some of the major railway lines built in the 19th century have high technical performance, such as a straight route. For example, the parameters of the 650 km long St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway2 built in 1851 allowed for the arrangement of high-speed traffi c (up to 250 km/h) after the reconstruction of its facilities without fundamentally altering the horizontal and vertical alignment.