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International Congress on High-speed Rail:
Technologies and Long Term Impacts
Ciudad Real (Spain), Octubre, 2017

This Special Issue of the journal joints a set of selected papers
presented in the International Congress on High Speed Rail that took
place on 4-6 October 2017 at the University of Castilla La Mancha
in Ciudad Real to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Madrid
Seville HSR corridor.

The congress plenary and parallel sessions were divided in three
days: the first and the third ones in Ciudad Real and the second was
held in Sevilla, moving the participants on board of an Special High Speed
Train (Miguel de Cervantes) service between Ciudad Real and Sevilla. In
particular, the commemorative video that was projected on board of
the train can be seen following that link: https://goo.gl/KfH9ZW

Regarding to the objective of the Congress, it was thought to evaluate
the usefulness of High-Seed Rail system under a quintuple perspective:

• Long-term implications
• Multidisciplinary scientific approach
• Transport relevance

• Territorial development
• Technology development and diffusion

The social cost and usefulness of the High Speed Rail system has
been abundantly studied prior to and shortly after the introduction
of this new transport mode. With this fact in mind, this Congress tried
to focus on a long-term perspective on its costs and benefits and on a
technology development and diffusion perspective. In fact, high speed
rail systems have already been in operation for just over half a century
in Japan and for 35 years in France. Thus, it was possible to debate its
pros and cons considering an important time span.

Finally, this International Congress combined several High Speed Rail
system point of view such as superstructure, infrastructure and rolling
material optimization, economic, urban and territorial development,
sustainability and energy savings, and safety.

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