ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — In the last years of the Cold War, the top-secret research institute that had designed the Soviet Union's nuclear submarines received an unusual request: Could it build a high-speed train?
The Soviet Union, despite its dependence on railroads, had fallen far behind Japan and Western Europe on high-speed transport. That the order came to the Rubin design bureau suggests that Moscow viewed catching upas a matter of national security.
The result of the littleknown program was a slategray, round-nosed locomotive called the Sokol, Russian for falcon, that petered out soon after the Soviet Union did. The prototype achieved a top speed of only 143 mph - hardly breaking a sweat by high-speed standards.
But the fall of the Falcon created an opening for Siemens.
This December, highspeed trains designed by theGerman conglomerate and adapted for Russian winters will ply the rails between St. Petersburg and Moscow. But Siemens hopes their final destination will be the last laggard of the high-speed age: the United States.
For years, businessmen and politicians have dreamed about America entering the high-speed era, but Amtrak has been plagued by budget and service problems. The closest Americans have come to high speed is Amtrak's Acela, which rarely runs at what Europeans call high speed.
Now Siemens and its competitors are hoping all that has changed. The economic stimulus passed by Congress in April includes a five-year, $13 billion high-speed rail program. Siemens is one of four makers of high-speed trains, none of them based in the United States, that hopes to take advantage of it.
Siemens executives said the tilt toward political acceptance of high-speed rail in the United States presented a remarkable business opportunity - assuming the systems get built.
The United States "is a developing country in terms of rail," Ansgar Brockmeyer, head of public transit business for Siemens, said in an interview aboard the Russian test train, as wooden country homes and birch forests flickered by outside the window. "We are seeing it as a huge opportunity."
To position itself to compete in the United States, Siemens has placed employees from its high-speed train division at its Sacramento, Calif., factory, which produces city trams.
Siemens' new train - the Sapsan, Russian for peregrine falcon - is a candidate for the high-speed link planned between San Francisco and Los Angeles for 2020. Alstom, the maker of the French TGV trains, and Bombardier are also contenders. Japanese bullet train designs by Hitachi, which are lighter but less secure in a low-speed crash, the only type of collisions survivable, are another option.
The technological breakthrough of the Sapsan is that the train has no locomotive. Instead, electric motors are attached to wheels all along the train cars, as on some subway trains. Its top operating speed is 217 mph, though in tests this model has reached 255 mph, or about half the cruising speed of some jet airplanes.
In Russia, it took a decade of on-again, off-again talks before Siemens signed a deal with the state railways in 2006 amid a general thaw in relations between Germany andRussia.
In Russia as elsewhere, high-speed trains will compete with airlines. The 401-mile trip from downtown Moscow to downtown St. Petersburg will be 3 hours and 45 minutes. The average flying travel time is five hours, including the trips to and from the airport, checkin and security clearance.
The four-times-a-day service will trim 45 minutes from the fastest train service now. To achieve this, the Russian state railway spent $485 million upgrading the track and $926 million for eight Sapsan trains and a 30-year service agreement.
In other countries, highspeed trains have roundly beaten planes on price, overall travel time and convenience at ranges up to 600 miles between major cities. After high-speed trains between Paris and Lyon became well established, for example, commercial flights all but disappeared. And in the first year of operation, a Madrid-to-Barcelona high-speed link cut the air travel market about 50 percent.
In the United States - where the Department of Transportation has identified 11 high-speed corridors, including Los Angeles to San Francisco - high-speed rail would also compete with intercity car travel.
In Russia, it has a more peculiar competitor. Withits vast distances and dismal roads, Russia has a long tradition of train travel, but Russians prefer to travel on overnight sleeper trains. Tea cups rattle on their saucers in the coal-heated compartments and beds are made with fresh linen.
The German trains, in contrast, are sleek strings of selfpropelled, aluminum-skinned cars. But they will travel far below their 217-mph operating speed.
Pulling out of the St. Petersburg station on the test run, the Russian conductor kept the Sapsan throttled back at a modest 90 mph as it rattled over older track in the city, making the typical clickety-clack noise of a train. High-speed rails are welded together and silent. It was like driving a new Porsche over a rutted road.
Out on refurbished track, the train accelerated to 150 mph, the threshold until additional track improvements are made. As yet, not all the ties are as rigid as they should be, and the overhead electrical wires wobble as the train speeds by underneath. Sometimes electricity arcs in fire bolts.
Still, Russia has arrived in the high-speed club that includes Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Spain, Taiwan, Korea and China, which joined in 2007.
Business, Pages 33, 38 on 09/26/2009