Japanese railroad will invest $3.1 billion to develop high-speed magnetic trains over the next decade, the company said today.
The spending by Central Japan Railway will expand a test track just west of Tokyo and fund new magnetically levitated, or "maglev," trains carriages.
The move comes as Germany and Japan jostle to win new customers for the high speed trains, which are the fastest in the world. Skimming over a guideway on powerful magnetic fields without touching the track, they can reach speeds of up to 360 miles per hour.
The technology is still under development, although there are two short stretches of commercially operating maglev trains, one in Shanghai and the other in the central Japanese city of Nagoya.
The announcement comes only just days after a crash of an experimental magnetic train in Germany killed 23 people.
German Traffic Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee was in China at the time of Friday's crash, trying to urge officials there to extend their use of the German-made technology along the Shanghai route, a contract that Japan competed for but lost.