At 186 miles per hour, the landscape starts to blur. A mile disappears every 20 seconds. An entire town can blink by in the time it takes to remember its name.
High-speed trains are, as the name suggests, fast. When two are traveling toward each other, the distance between them can close at double their top speed. Sixty seconds after they pass — a moment when the drivers barely have the chance to exchange a friendly wave — they can be six miles apart, relentlessly powering across the countryside, each with more than 1,000 passengers on board.
That breathtaking pace makes the recent deadly crash between two high-speed trains in Spain even more alarming. Despite an extraordinary global safety record, the…