>>1209029>>1209206Thank all the tunnels on the newer Shinkansen routes for that. The increasingly bizzare looking schnozzes on the Shinkansen sets are all about minimizing those sudden uncomfortable pressure increases that passengers feel every time a HST enters a tunnel.
With the exception of the Chunnel, most of HST-traversed Europe is as flat as a pizza compared to Japan, and as a result their HST designers were able to focus more on aesthetics than anything else, just as the origina HST designers for the Tokaido Shinkansen were.
The rest of the Shinkansen's weirdness just stems from the Japanese and their autistic pursuit of efficiency, which is why you see shit like those skirts covering the bogies and the aerodynamic baffles around the gaps between coaches and the pantographs. They're really the ultimate evolution of track-based HST design, but like a 3rd-stage Guild navigator they've evolved so spectacularly thanks to all the lessons learned from 50+ years of high speed running that they barely resemble trains anymore.
