HASSELDoes this train make me look fat?

We are kind of excited about the fact that the Aussies have designed a train that would take people from Sydney to Melbourne (roughly the same distance apart as Portland, Maine and Baltimore) in a little over two hours, at speeds of about 250 mph.

Reader support helps sustain our work. Donate today to keep our climate news free. All donations DOUBLED!

We would love to ride that train. Trains are awesome. They go fast. They are social. They are romantic. Alfred Hitchcock liked trains, which really says enough; add to this the fact that they are actually pretty clean and easy on the environment and shit, and we can’t think of a bad thing to say about trains. Eight million people regularly travel between Sydney and Melbourne, and considering this train might save them 10 or 12 hours on the road, we imagine they are rather jazzed about trains themselves.

The train is designed by the firm HASSEL and is based on a 1960s muscle car, the Holden HK Monaro (which is sort of Australia’s answer to the Camaro). It’s so cool it’s upsetting. Because not only are our trains ugly, we also don’t have enough of them, and the ones we do have don’t go fast enough, unless of course the reason it takes 14 hours to cross Connecticut is because our maps have all lied to us and it’s really the size of Siberia.

Grist thanks its sponsors. Become one.