Standing on a platform as a bullet train hurtles past at top speed can be an unnerving experience.

Spare a thought, then, for the dozens of new employees of West Japan Railway forced to squat in a trough between two sets of tracks as shinkansen trains whoosh by at speeds of up to 187mph (300km/h).

Future trainees can count themselves lucky after the firm agreed to halt the exercise following pressure from a rail workers’ union.

Instead, from next month, employees will watch the trains pass from behind a trackside fence outdoors.

The exercise – introduced in 2016 to raise safety awareness among carriage inspectors – required groups of employees, dressed in hard hats and goggles, to enter a tunnel and crouch inside a narrow maintenance ditch between two sets of tracks located a metre away on either side.

The aim, according to company officials, was to give workers a greater appreciation of the force generated by trains traveling at maximum speed.

JR West introduced the drill after an aluminium part fell from the outside of a bullet train and struck the body of the train as it passed through a tunnel in south-west Japan in 2015. One passenger was injured in the accident, which Investigators blamed on loose bolts and insufficient inspections.

About 240 employees, mainly from a nearby railyard, have taken part in the exercise. One told the Mainichi Shimbun earlier this year: “The wind pressure was enormous. I felt as if I had been pressed down from above. It was scary, and I wondered what the point of it was.”

The union representing the employees described the training programme as dangerous and unnecessary, and called repeatedly for it to be halted.

Local media quoted one employee as saying the experience was “horrible”, while another likened it to a “public flogging”.

“Exposing employees to danger is a problem,” an official from the West Japan Railway Workers Union told the Asahi. “Workers have been forced to undergo the training programme as a sort of punishment for the accident.”

Other regional firms belonging to the Japan Railway group allow trainees to observe passing bullet trains from platforms.

The trains are renowned for their punctuality and safety. The shinkansen network, which runs from the southern island of Kyushu to Hokkaido in the far north, has not suffered a single fatality from accidents since it was launched in 1964.