The Tilted Bullet Train That Turned Everyone Into Michael Jackson

What's going on

A Tokaido Shinkansen — the high-speed line that links Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto and Osaka — was brought to a stop after an incident on the tracks involving a person. As it happened, the train came to rest not on a straight stretch but partway through a curve.

On high-speed curves, the track is deliberately banked: the outer rail is raised above the inner one so trains can sweep through at speed without flinging passengers sideways. At full speed you barely notice it — the lean of the carriage and the pull of the curve quietly cancel each other out. A train stopped dead on that same banked curve, however, has nothing left to cancel. The floor simply sits at a slant, and it stays that way. For the people aboard this train, that slant held for roughly three hours.

The result: standing passengers had to lean hard just to keep their footing, frozen at an angle that looked uncannily like Michael Jackson's gravity-defying tilt from "Smooth Criminal." The internet, of course, noticed.