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If you can get past how Superman prances to save the train at the start of the trailer for the 1948 serial (Superman's first movie!), you'll hear him say that he can travel 2,000 miles in 30 seconds. That's 67 miles per second. That's fast! Not speed of light fast, but still definitely much faster than a speeding locomotive, which in the 1940s was something like 0.04 miles per second.

Trains are faster now, but so is Superman. In Superman: The World, released last week, mild-mannered Clark Kent takes a commercial flight to Metropolis from Los Angeles. Since we know that Metropolis is close to New York City, we can assume Metropolis is about 2,800 miles from Los Angeles. Google tells me a commercial flight between the two cities takes about 5.5 hours, meaning an average travel speed of 509 miles per hour, or 0.14 miles per second, more than three times faster than a speeding locomotive!

But I don't mention that because Superman now has access to jet flight. In the story, he claims to be able to "fly to Alpha Centauri and back in the time it takes to get from L.A. To Metropolis." Alpha Centauri is 2.45 light years away from Earth, meaning Superman would have to travel at an average speed of 2,531,670,000 miles per second to get there an back in 5-and-a-half hours. By comparison, the speed of light is a measly 186,282 miles per second.

Physically impossible? Maybe. But we are talking about Superman.

My point is that I think it's past time we stopped comparing Superman's speed to trains.

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Put here for future reference:

Yes, I've watched the whole thing and tried to follow along on my slide rule at home — Picture Pages style! — but I keep checking my answers with a calculator. It's right more often than I am.

(I should also admit that watching this made me very, very depressed when my thoughts briefly strayed into consideration of returning to a world without computers. I really shouldn't think about such things.)

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