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Riding the World's Fastest Train @ 500 kph
angkor writes "Riding the world's fastest train @ 500 kph - some lucky people got a chance to ride on this experimental train. The Japan Times has the story." I like the part where the wheels retract as it starts picking up speed, with the train floating 10cm over the tracks. If only the California high-speed rail system was up and running.
this will make for some spectacular derailments if Amtrak gets their hands on it
This space available.
It'll be forever before we have such a lovely thing in the US, with our collective allergy to mass transit...
The rest of the world has the right of it, I think, sometimes.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
damn, i sure wouldn't mind having that for my morning commute
Maybe after tested but I would not want to be a guiney pig @ 500 kph
large population + not much room == no choice.
Never believe in anything until it has been officially denied. -Otto von Bismarck
The us really does need a good, highspeed rail system. At least routes between NY, Chicago, and DC - or even going
farther west Ny -> La? It would greatly cut down on air traffic and also be much more comfortable.
wow.
heh....
I can't claim to be old enough to remember much passenger train transportation (20 yrs,) but I still feel kind of bad that we don't do more in that department here in the US. Surely it would be less expensive for the end user and more efficient for mass transport than the net of air travel paths that we currently use so frequently.
I'm none too familiar with transportation in Europe (as I've never been there,) but I understand that train transport is much bigger across the pond. In which countries is this most prevalent and how is it working out cost wise for all involved?
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
...but when does it turn into a giant robot?
Karma: Bad (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)...Now i know why.
I hate flying. The cramped seats. The claustrophobia. The ridiculous rules about standing and walking around...
I'd much rather travel by train, but it's always been much too slow. Even though these new trains are still slower than flying, they make up the difference quite a bit.
A smooth, relaxing train ride where all seats are Business class or better? Sign me up.
I have been pwned because my
that the thing didn't derail itself or such. 500 kph is too fast to be on it at an 'experimental' stage.
I'd love for this train to become reality, but can it be made safe against terrorists?
This article in the The Journal of Homeland Security talks all about mass transit being used as a tool for mass terrorism, including the 1995 derailment of the Sunset Limited in the Arizona desert. That incident killed 1 and injured 65 and it was not traveling at 500kph.
Right now, the idea of maglev trains and all that exposed track scares me.
"You can move freely because there are no seat belts." Not that seatbelts do you much good at these kind of speeds, but a seatbelt might make some people feel safer at least.
It's a really big and slow airplane.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
But JR Tokai executive Chuji Morishita said, "This is the third railway traffic revolution, following railway construction in the Meiji Era and the Tokaido Shinkansen Line after World War II."
"The inauguration of the maglev will break Japan's stagnation, both politically and economically," he reckoned.
Wow, now that's confidence.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Is the train powered by solar energy? I'm just asking cause I know we have had some problems in the past with solar powered trains, or more specifically, monorails.
I am just wondering the cultural obsession that the Japanese have with rail systms, if any one has an answer.
Perhaps your question should be "What is the reason for the lack of a good rail system in the USA?" Lots of places in the world have good rail transport, not just Japan, virtually all of Europe too.
That would be 310.685 mph. :)
what happened to the German Transrapid. It's latest installment was imho somewhere in Japan too and ppl were pretty excited about that.
Another fact that came to my mind was a reason for never building such a 500kph-train in Germany. If they ever want to transport nuclear waste to a recycling facility.....
It's been a kind of sport for certain ppl to glue themselves to the rails with chains or even concrete. I wonder how many activist 'd be fried on the track or what how long (distance) it'll take for such a train to stop.
As I don't know, too lazy to check now, how much a Yen is, I wonder about the economic factors. Will it be cheaper to take the train for certain distances? Or would it be cheaper to take your normal flight? I mean... yeah 500kph is great.. but... think about the landscape, the money and the real overall usability. Dont you think a "normal" train would do the same for ***LESS*** money (and 2 hours more)?
0 001 11 1
So baby, wanna become a member of the 500km/hr club?
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
The UK, after all, has a worse rail safety history than the average rollercoaster.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
with the train floating 10cm over the tracks
So, all a terrorist needs is an 11cm rock...
What happen? Main electric board turn on. We get signal.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
10 quick beers before you go: $40
Ticket on the new train: $110
Accepting a dare from your mates: Free
Being the first person to do a 500 kph face-plant into a low bridge while train surfing: Priceless
Well actually i'm wondering what's the obsession of US ppl with cars?
As far as i know US is one of the worst countries on the world concerning air pollution and in addition one of the only (not 3th world) not to accept world wide pollution restrictions.
Yes here in Italy its quite cheap to take a train to your destination. As gas is currently 1.10 euro/litre, so like appx 4 dollars/gallon, you can quickly understand why a 40 euro/30 dollar train pass (depends on the distance you travel) becomes an easy solution. Also if you decide to travel throughout Europe, you can get a pass thats good for the whole way (some places you have to pay a little extra, but still less expensive then flying/driving). Its nice after a long day at work, to be able to hop the train home, you dont have to deal with traffic jams and you are free to move around. In the end it would cost me more to take a car to work, and longer as the roads here are not as straight and big as usa interstates. I have visited usa, and can see why mass transit would be more of a problem as things are spread further apart and there is no mass collaboration on public transport, like here you can get to a stop, then continue on a greyhound like bus to a more remote destination.
I'm serious. You'll understand really quickly how damned important it is to them. Live there for a few months, and you'll be obsessing too.
Imagine being able travel from San Francisco to LA using nothing but train lines, yet be able to stop in, and get around in, every single town between. The trains in Japan are not just for the long distance hauling that we see here, they are really and truly for transportation. Almost every city in the country has thier streets criss-crossed with subways. You can't walk more than two blocks in Osaka without running into one. All the cities are connected from the biggest metropolis to the tiniest villiage.
They are relativly cheap, they are never late, and riding them with your laptop makes commuting fun! And you don't even have to live in the boondocks to be one of those train commuters, because the trains are ubiquitous.
Cars have thier place, but until you have been to Japan, you simply have no idea how amazing trains can be...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
French TGV is faster
322mph or 515kph
And it's a years-old record
It is still a train since it has all the convenience features of a train: stops in the middle of the city, no check-in time, and you can move around in it. Think restaurant/bistro! Combine that with a frequency of every ten minutes (not so much for interregional travel) and it behaves like a train in most senses.
Also, try to do the math on a four hour trip with it: half an hour drive to the airport, 45 min (at least) for check-in, wait 20 min for take-off, get up to cruising height, cruise 50 min, get down, wait for your baggage, drive half an hour to town. Sound much better?
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
Not only is Japan a little too small for the Japanese to all go off on their own cars, no matter how miniature those are, but what we call "individuality" and try to keep at all costs just does not have the same value in Japan.
Japan is an island, with an almost perfectly uniform population of the same ethnical background. The standard education system makes sure that at about the age 18, all Japanese are practically the same person (not that this is different anywhere else, of course). You may have heard of the morning meetings in big Japanese corporations where employees gather in the morning to sing together the company "anthem".
It is understandable that America, with its emphasis on individuality, with its various ethnic, educational, etc backgrounds, favors the individual car over public transportation. Likewise, it is understandable that the Japanese are happy with their public transportation.
If I may digress for a minute here, it is the Japanese' common background & common ways of thinking that leads to that obscure way of formal conversation, where a guy saying "it looks like it may rain today" may mean that he is beginning to hate your guts
Siemens has a test track for a maglev train in Germany, just across the border with the Netherlands. Though it is a very popular destination with groups of students, politicians and housewives, it hasn't convinced anyone (with enough money) yet that it is a good idea to build.
There have been two cases for it in Germany and the Netherlands, Hamburg-Berlin and Amsterdam-Groningen, both times it failed on the excessive costs that are nescessary to build this track. The main problem of the system lies in the fact that at speeds above 300km/hr the magnetic system creates a drag of its own, so the drag of the wheels and track have been substituted. Furthermore the aerodynamic drag turns out to be a much more important factor than they first expected. So instead of being signifficantly more efficient at high speeds, it is only marginally more efficient at a much higher investment cost. That is why both the Dutch and German government decided not to build production tracks.
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For the record, the Federal Railroad Administration has a Maglev page here. looks like the page hasn't been updated too recently, which is either good news or bad news, depending on what side of the monorail you're on...
* I'm saying this as an example my dear NSA and FBI. I am not a terrorist, and you shouldn't paint me as one because I also believe in encryption for privacy.
Karma whorin' since 1999
Well, in France most people use high speed train (TGV - 360kph, tested @ 515kph) rather than plane or conventional train...
Reasons :
For a trip from Paris to Lyon (about 450km/280 mi) :
Why take a plane ?
And those trains are quite safe : a handful of those trains derailed, but no-one was killed...
...and in no time at all, we will see all these japanese nerds having fun with gint custom made rail guns utilizing the train track and it's magnetic field.
Does karma mean that much to you , that your not willing to sacrafice some to help a little boy.
"Kph" (kilo per hour???) does't mean anything!
It must be write Km/h, at least!
The Times article is nice and gives a good feel of what new generations trains will feel for passengers in a distant future, however the technology and the various experimental versions of high speed levitating trains are not exactly new.
Maglev research started in 1962, and by 1970 studies of electrodynamic levitation systems using superconducting magnets took shape. The first test run took place in 1979. In December 1986, a 3-car train registered 352.4 kph (220 mph). In December 1997, a manned MLX01 attained 531 kph (331 mph), and unmanned, attained 550 kph (344 mph). The following year, a test of two trains passing each other at a relative speed of 966 kph was run successfully. In March 1999, an unmanned five-car MLX01 reached 548 kph (342 mph). In April, the manned five-car MLX01 set a fabulously fast world speed record at 552 kph (345 mph).
We can see that the Japanese aren't ready for commercial deployment yet, as the article reads on:
Europeans daily experience high speed trains for the last decade, with the Eurostar and the TGV cruising commercially at over 300 kph (188 mph). The German have the ICE, which reaches 330 kph (206 mph). The Spanish Talgo is in the works and will do 350 kph (218 mph).
The French TGV has been going at 515 kph several years ago (albeit it was not pulling regular cars). And that was with a regular train (no funny shit with the wheels, just a long straight railway)
A maglev track means that new tracks have to be built in addition to the existing tracks (unless you switch all your trains at once or manage to fit both varieties on the same tracks). This implies a huge expense for buying new land, building and maintaining new tracks, etc.
FWIW the French TGV managed 515 km/h on tracks. The current limit of 300-350km/h is because of structural problems on unadapted tracks at high speeds (the train is designed to go fast on adapted tracks and slower on regular ones). There is also a problem with the electric alimentation, a wave travels in front of the train which can lift the wire enough to disconnect it.
Anyway you don't need maglev (even though it's cooler) to go fast
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I am just wondering the cultural obsession that the Japanese have with rail systms, if any one has an answer.
Perhaps your question should be "What is the reason for the lack of a good rail system in the USA?" Lots of places in the world have good rail transport, not just Japan, virtually all of Europe too.
Actually, I prefer it when you ask the question "I am just wondering the cultural obsession that the Americans have with cars, if any one has an answer."
In Melbourne (my breif experience with America tells me you guys are worse), the average car trip length is 5km. I live 12 km from work/uni, and I ride the distance twice daily, and am much happier for it!
Though I am not sure at what speed it will run, Shanhai will have a maglev train running by sometime next year (it is currently under construction) from their new airport to a central Shanghai terminal or two.
High speed rail is great in dense Japan, but for California it's a waste. Rail's big cost is all that land and that fancy rail on it that, for any given piece of land, is only actively put to work a tiny fraction of the time.
They always talk about how the train would be competitive in downtown to downtown. That's because they ignore the fact you could put the high speed train from the downtown to the airport for a fraction of the price, and check you in on the train to drop you off in the secured area.
So run the high speed rail within the bay area and the L.A. basin where it makes sense, but seriously, are we going to see the desired traffic from Fresno to Modesto to justify the cost?
And it's an even worse terrorist target than the planes, since you can't guard the whole track, and a slight problem can cause a catastrophe at that speed.
Some arguments for building these types of fast trains according to Lyle Lanley, a gifted monorail salesman, spoken on a meeting of the Springfields townspeople on how to spend Mr. Burns's 3 million dollar fine for illegal waste dumping:
Monorail
Lyle Lanley: Well, sir, there's nothing on earth Like a genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car Monorail!
What'd I say?
Ned Flanders: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
Patty+Selma: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: That's right! Monorail!
[crowd chants `Monorail' softly and rhythmically]
Miss Hoover: I hear those things are awfully loud...
Lyle Lanley: It glides as softly as a cloud.
Apu: Is there a chance the track could bend?
Lyle Lanley: Not on your life, my Hindu friend.
Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lyle Lanley: You'll be given cushy jobs.
Abe: Were you sent here by the devil?
Lyle Lanley: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
Wiggum: The ring came off my pudding can.
Lyle Lanley: Take my pen knife, my good man.
I swear it's Springfield's only choice...
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: Once again...
All: Monorail!
Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
All: Monorail!
Monorail!
Monorail!
[big finish]
Monorail!
Homer: Mono... D'oh!
For a more in-depth explanation of the Yamanashi Test Line Maglev trains' technology check out this link. Quite interesting stuff!
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
How about a 7.5hour trip(4100KM/550kph) from North America to Asia? (Of course this is assuming the shortest distance being between Canada and Japan taking the sea route.) This currently costs about 2000$ Canadian by air and takes 12 hours, not including airport waiting time and other hassle.
Some not-well-serviced by flight or existing rail is the ideal places to build one of these...
Add one engineering fact, air-friction. Build a vacuum tube from North America to Japan and the efficiency of the maglev will increase... and be free from conventional terrorist threats (what are you going to do, highjack a train and play "speed" with it to see if you can blow a hole in the train station?)
Technically, the world fastest train is at White Sands Missile Range, where a top speed just shy of 10,000km/h (that's Mach 8!) was recorded in 1982. Unsurprisingly it was unmanned. It wasn't maglev, either, being a conventional wheels on track train (albeit a rocket powered one :-)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Normal trains only travel at 50 -- 75 mph, while these new trains travel at 500 mph. If you look at the equation you stated, E=mv^2, you will notice that v is the dominant term. The trains would have to be much lighter to produce the same energy. E = m1 v1^2, E = m2 v2^2, => m1/m2 = v2^2 / v1^2 = (v2/v1)^2 = (50/500)^2 = (1/10)^2 = .1^2 = 0.01. The faster train could only be 1% the mass of the slower one in order to produce the same effect, or put another way, if the two trains are the same mass then the faster one will crash with 100 times as much energy. While I have no trouble believing that the faster trains might be even as light as 1/5 the traditional ones, I seriously doubt they ar 1/100 the mass.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Couldn't they concipiate a train based on supercollider antigravitational force ?
:)
Imagine a train being pushed from the rails.
Well, that's whats happening already of course
I believe they have, what; 1/2 of the population of the entire US in the space of California?
In the US, we'd have to put tracks EVERYWHERE to get an equivelent connection to what Japan has.
(Hm... Or, we could just move EVERYBODY to Washington, Oregon, and California, set the rest aside for public parks and farming, and THEN build our cool train system...)
Well, it turns out that the so-called "Tokyo's airports" aren't really close to Tokyo at all, and by the time you land in Shin-Osaka, you've spent over 2 hours getting there. Driving is out of the question, as traffic is horrible at all times, and you have to worry about expensive tolls on the not-so-freeway every 40 miles or so... ...not to mention the $5/gallon gas... So... what about bullet trains?
The bullet trains that go as fast as 300kph would get there in under 2 hours, but because the express train (Hikari, means "light") shares most of the same rails as the every-station-stop train (Kodama, means "echo" - get it? :) ), it can't always go 300kph. Even though it doesn't stop at every station, the Hikari train still has to slow down to around 50% speed when it's whizzing by the folks waiting on the platform 5 feet away, which slows the entire trip to 3+ hours.
You know, this isn't too far-fetched an idea... The maglev will undoubtedly have its own rail, and if it makes only 3~4 stops along the way to Osaka, it'll definitely do the Tokyo-Osaka run in under an hour. The construction of the maglev would create more jobs, and the one-hour commute will encourage "business" to take place faster. Will the maglev railway will turn a profit by itself? Probably not... But will it become a catalyst for Japan's economy to get healthier? Possibly so...!I just hope they include the maglev for the week-long rail passes.
- posting anonymously, seeing as how my karma can only go down...
If you go to this page, you can also see that the Bundesrechnungshof (General Acounting Office) says that it is not economically feasible. The politicians of Northrhine Westphalia disagree, but that has often been the case with projects of great grandeur and little economic value.
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dude. brilliant.
Here, I post this at +2 to give you 3 karma. Godbless you Timmah.
Dear Timmy,
There is something your mommy and doctor asked me to tell you. First of all, there are facts of life you may not understand but will have to accept. You're mommy is not rich. She probably never will be. She's not even young and pretty so prostitution is out of the question. There are people in the world that aren't as fortunate as others, and you are one of them. You are going to eventually die, while we relax in our jet baths and watch COPS on TV. (TV is a non-film method of transfering moving images through electormagnetic waves, but this is of little importance to you now.) You are lucky though, because in your underdeveloped world I am sure the doctors will be more than willing to give you a liberal dose of morphine, something we pay a lot of money for to buy in dark alleys.
You do have some luck though! You have come to the right place to find karma. If you are lucky enough, you will collect enough karma to be born a brahmon in India in your next life. Whether or not you consider this "a good thing" is up to you.
Um... you are a Hindu, right?
Because everyone elses little cars are crap.
The Transrapid will be built for commercial operations in China, to link the Shanghai to its new Pudong airport, and then further. Munich is also considering to link its airport to town with a transrapid.
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Obvious problems with article.
Good moderation here tonight. Yet another monorail quip from the Simpsons gets modded to 4, funny, and my post, a post that referenced the freaking journal of homeland security and how that journal feels about mass transit and terrorism gets modded as a troll.
Hey, even in Japan with the Aum Shinrikyo killing 5 in the subways, I bet they wonder about terrorism and maglev trains.
That's okay moderators, moderate the posts you want to see, not the posts that inform.
It's very disheartening to be in a city with lousy traffic situations. For all the money that Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue/Kirkland/etc area has, the traffic here is horrible.
Sure, there is the Sounder, but it's light rail. We could learn a lot from Sydney's (or Australia in general) rail system.. or even Vancouver, BC has a nice mesh of rail & ferries.
Anyone have any suggestions? Just curious...
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
I am just wondering the cultural obsession that the Japanese have with rail systms, if any one has an answer.
There are probably many reasons. The first being that it would be impossible for Japan to function with this many people driving cars. There's not enough room! The train system in Japan (this is only the subways of Tokyo. There's an equally complex network of above ground trains in Tokyo that basically overlap with this system) is very extensive. You can practically get anywhere in Japan on a train, and maybe a 1 or 2 hour bus ride if the train isn't going exactly where you want.
Another reason is there are cute girls who go up and down the aisles selling snacks, beer, and sake! (and I guess coffee, too)
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Don't repeat it.
no/poor public transportation + long commute = obsession with cars
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
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Injured how many there?
That record looks terrible!
I remember being told software I worked on was considered for use by Dutch railways, in a secondary system. I thought, God no, I have to travel on those trains! (on holiday). Fortunately they were persuaded not to use our stuff (which was not at all designed for safety critical systems). But maybe other office-software companies were less scrupulous.
I guess Russian trains benefit from wide-gauge, and very long distances between junctions, hence the low value.
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Hey, ounces are damn cool.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
...oh, wait...
I suggest that you put this letter in your journal, so we can all place "SAVE TIMMY!" hyperlinks to it in our sigs.
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Don't use the prefixes.
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Decimal being as used as much as base 7: Priceless.
This picture actually shows Eurostars in London. I hope California didn't pay a lot for their virtual railway. (just kidding)
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
i just like to remind everyone that Shanghai will have a running maglev from Pudong Airport to the city by the end of the year. you can read the details here. the taxi driver i talked to said the train ride will take 5 minutes. 5 minutes for a maglev train!!! how silly is that?!?
And also there are rumors that china will build a maglev connecting Beijing and Shanghai by 2008 (for the 2008 olympics). knowing how chinese love to show off, i wouldn't bet against this.
i say we wait and see how china does with their maglev... they have enough people to spare (j/k)
Almost true! There is/was a US current affairs program called "60 minutes" but it's only 40 minutes long!
chrisd
This is very unfortunate, but perhaps it is more common here than in the USA because you can't buy guns/bullets/assault rifles from the local convenience stores here (after the Dunblane massacre, the public and govt. decided shooting people was a Bad Thing) so people seek alternative ways to do that.
And here you would fry even without a train hitting you, because the third rail carries a damn big DC current. (Is that a win for Edison over Tesla wrt short distances?)
Wow, after they banned smoking in airplanes (and other places), we can finally light one up again while travelling the country at high speeds. Kuddos to the railway system!
on the main southern train line (london-brighton) when we are travelling at ~20 km/h. There are some areas (in the open air) where signal will just cut out and then come back a hundred metres later. Maybe the operators should worry about those ones first.
In Star Wars terms,
Europe = Corusant
America = Tatooine.
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
Wing in Ground-effect trains may be possible and much cheaper to build than maglev ones. You build a smoothe concrete track with walls and the train flies along inside that a few feet off the deck, held up purely by the aerodynamic ground effect. So the theory goes. Now, if you built one that went from, say, London to Paris, you could call it the Syrup of Figs in honour of all thoes cheeky chirpy cockney geezers.
Stick Men
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Oh just reply. Do it. Say something.
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Hi, Australia. Australia is different, and likes hexadecimal.
I'm informing you in this message that your use of decimal is disturbing to geeks. I think it likely that you do not know what radices mean, or else you would be using hexadecimal. Read about hexadecimal at intuitor and repost your comment using hexadecimal. You may use "0x" as a prefix or "h" as a suffix for the numbers. Intelligent people despise decimal--so try to show some intelligence. Perhaps you are just too stupid to get it. Please reply using this subject--I'll check for replies by it.
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How many minutes there?
WHATEVER
here's a nickle, go buy a life
I'm quite astonished that noone seems to mention, that a German consortium is building a Maglev train in China (Shanghai Airport -- City) and that there will be two Transrapid routes in Germany, one in Munich (Airport -- City) and one in the Ruhrregion between Dortmund and Duesseldorf. Shanghai should be ready in less than a year and the two German routes should be ready for the Soccer World Championship in 2006.
You can find more info on the website of Transrapid in English or German.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
It's true that those high-speed tracks are tremendously expensive. Only a nationalized company like the SNCF can do it on such a large scale (eg, Paris-Marseille, over 800 km, 3 hours, track completed last year). I think the SNCF is a good example of why public services like railways are better not privatized...
between the axis Lille - Paris - Lyon - Marseille (thats 1027 kilometer). They are the 4 biggest cities of France. Paris -Lille is only a 50 minutes long trip, making the trip more or less like a subway ride. Many people live in Lille and work in Paris and vice versa now! The first high speed track was inaugurated the 27th Sep 1981, and was renovated when Lyon-Marseille high speed track opened in June 2001. The max speed on the Paris-Lyon is now 350km/h. The commercial speed is 330kmh, the 20km margin is used when trains are late. I can witness on that because I take that line at least 20 times a year, and my train has never been late, and last year the trip took 2h now it's 1h50! Actually, the tracks tend to become saturated, with a train every 2mn, but delays are rare, except on the newly opened Lyon-Marseille.
http://www.pageliberale.org
I remember travelling on this just after it opened in 1984 and was amazed by the sci-fi-ness of it all.
Maglev was prone to unreliability and was recently scrapped and replaced with a traditional people mover
Evil ZEN Scientist
See my other post about Birmingham, UK maglev - launched in August 1984 - scrapped in 1995.
Evil ZEN Scientist
panties! panties! panties!
Chii! Chii?!
to get my hands on one of these babies for allah! expect great things for yankee american dogs soon! praise be to allah!
June 15th, 2002 - Jihad will come. Many will die. Few will survive. A new age of trolling will emerge.
Why is everybody using "kph" instead of "km/h"? There's even a Unicode symbol for km — (U+339E) — it's always km, not k (k is kilo- and m is meter). This is the first time I have ever seen "kph" and it seems to be the most (the only?) popular form here on Slashdot. Please someone explain me why (and when) do you use "kph", because I thought that the only correct forms are km/h and kmh, thanks.
Krótko: kady Erotomek
W pimiennictwie ma swój domek.
Looks like California High Speed Rail have decided to use the same blue-prints for the trains as used by the Eurostar. At least thats from looking at the photos.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Have you thought about the real costs? Yes, tracks are expensive, but so are airports. I have no idea how much an average airport costs, but they are probably one of the most expensive community projects you can get. And they are expensive to maintain too. And then there is the cost of the airplanes. Aircraft are very expensive to build and maintain, much more than trains. The most expensive train in the world is the Eurostar at $40,000 a seat. Most aircraft by comparison are $200,000 per seat!
And don't get me started about fuel efficency. Hurling few hundreds passengers in tonnes of metal up to 10km height!? Just think how much fuel that wastes.
Airplanes have their uses, I doubt trains will ever replace airplanes on coast to coast routes, but they could work on something like the Boston-Wasington route.
But I guess the airlines are quite good at lobbying, wasn't there a mag-lev project in Texas that was cancelled due to airline lobbying? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
In Europe (as in the USA from what I read in other comments) the railway system has had a lot of problems: not being on time, bad management, bad equipment, bad products, ...
But in the last few years Railway operators have discovered the business market and are offering new (high speed) products towards that market.
Thalys and Eurostar are two great examples. They interconnect a few major cities in differnt European countries. Especially THALYS (connecting Brussels (B), Amsterdam (NL) and Colone (D) amongst others) is a big success. It's not much faster or cheaper than flying, but it's much more luxurious and they drive you right to the city centre.
Eurostar (connecting Brussels, Paris and London)is not yet very successful, but that's because can't yet benifit from high speeds on the English tracks.
Spot on. Here in Switzerland we are lucky enough to have one of the best public transport systems in the world.
Taking the train is not a just an acceptable option, it is genuinely preferable to driving. Spacious, clean, comfortable compartments, superb child facilities, never late, etc. etc. etc.
If the proper infrastructure is there, it will be used and enjoyed. Or, in short: If you build it, they will commute.
I am a Karma Library.
i wouldn't mind driving someone elses little porsche...
The SNCF requires *massive* state subsidies to do this. If the US government paid Amtrak anything like what the French paid SNCF, then you wouldn't just have TGVs and Bullet trains, you'd have MagLev's running at 1000mph.
--- My dad's political betting
a train is derailed at 300 KMH and no one gets killed ? what are the french made of, nanotubes ?
any links to thess miracles ?
Working for necessity's mother.
some lucky people got a chance to ride on this experimental train
Let's see....get a steel tube hurtling across the ground at ~500km/h, and oh! It's still in a stage being called "experimental"! These people are about as lucky as my one-eyed three-legged ringwormed dog bearing that name.
I took the Amtrak Southwest Chief from Kansas to LA over Christmas. Being able to stretch out (I'm 6'4") and having a sleeper to nap in, plus a 110V plug for my laptop was great.
Damn well better be great, at $1100 round-trip.
However, keep this in mind: When a plane lands at an airport, that is a minimum of 45 minutes from touchdown to takeoff, and usually more like an hour. The train stops are 5 minutes.
Now, it takes 3 days to get from New York to LA via rail (and a day and a quarter from KS to LA). The fastest the train goes is about 75 MPH (about 125 kph). Most of the trip's legs are pretty long - a TGV would be able to run at top speed for more than 90% of the run. That would pull the time down to less than a day from NY to LA.
Trains are FAR more efficent than planes at moving people, so the cost per seat can be far less. Also, making the train bigger or smaller depending upon load is easy - add cars. You really can't bolt a few extra seats on a plane. You also can make the seats larger on a train for comparitively less cost than a plane.
So, why don't we have this in the US? First, there's the Teamsters - they would much rather see freight move by truck than train, as that employs more Teamsters. Second, when the government cherry-picked the passenger rail from Sante Fe et. al., they really screwed up. SF owns the rail beds, and SF sees no reason to improve the railbeds to allow for fast trains. Amtrak would like faster trains, but with the railbeds in the condition they are, 70MPH is the limit. Also, since Amtrak is forbidden to carry significant freight, they cannot use freight to subsidise passenger service.
It's a shame, since if we had a decent rail service in this country, we would need fewer airports and aircraft (though, living in the Air Capitol of the World, that might be a bad thing) and we could reduce the numbers of trucks and cars on the highways (especially if Amtrak offered more AutoTrain service - I'd love to pull my car on a train in Newton, and pull off in Williams, then drive to the Grand Canyon).
But as long as SF sees no reason for faster freight service, and Amtrak cannot upgrade the lines, we will be stuck with the CF we have now.
www.eFax.com are spammers
This train had its first ride in 1999, so all of this is nothing new.
The Mini Repository - more links
The US has a fantastic railroad system. But it moves mostly freight; obviously, the long distances make this the most economical use. One of Amtrak's thornier problems is that the freight companies don't want the low-revenue (but high-priority) passenger trains clogging up their systems.
Fact is, our rail system is very strong and very healthy, and it keeps a LOT of trucks off the highways. And it does that without any significant subsidy. Which I think is pretty cool.
Nothing against passenger travel, I took a couple of cross-country trips on Amtrak some years ago, and enjoyed 'em a lot. Unfortunately, people working at fast food joints were paying the taxes that subsidized my sleeping car room. Even so, it cost more than flying, took three days longer... and Amtrak still lost money.
Long-distance passenger travel just isn't viable in the US, except as a luxury, and it never will be. How could a train be built that replaces an existing Amtrak route and yet be profitable? It's impossible. Costs would be higher, and the potential for extra revenue just isn't there.
Freight trains, though, moves great quantities of stuff at little cost to the public.
It's true. You can catch the train from Yokohama to Tokyo for 260 yen. That's an intercity trip, folks. It goes from Yokohama to Kawasaki to Tokyo. This is not the bullet train, just an ordinary electric train called the Tokyu Toyoko Line. The train runs about every 3 minutes at peak times, down to about every 10 or 15 minutes at times like 4am. The train is ALWAYS on time, except for if it crashes, which hardly ever happens. You can get on the train practically anywhere (there are stations all over the place), and the trains will be clean and not covered in grafitti. They might be extremely crowded at peak times however, and you will have to physically force yourself onto the train. But maybe that's better than sitting in a traffic jam burning dinosaur bones? What do you think?
It's usually cheaper (and faster, even over short distances, like DC to NYC) to fly than to fly.
In fact, it's often faster and cheaper to HIRE A LIMO and drive! (This is despite I-95 traffic)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I think supercavitation is pretty much only applicable in liquids...
You can probably use neat tricks to reduce drag a lot in a train anyway. (But a lot of them have already been used in high-speed trains.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
what are the french made of...?
I knew they were spineless, but I didn't realize they were completely boneless! B-)
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The Swiss are currently working on underground maglev trains that would run in tunnels under partial vacuum.
Some interesting ideas are the tunnels do not follow the curvature of the earth (so it is downhill out of every station and uphill into every station) and the motors are in the track rather than the trains.
train or crew hijackings
maglev train testcars for transrapid in germany worked without crew, so no one in controls to threathen
maglevs are railed, compared to planes - you cannot target it anywhere unexpected
the problem of animals etc getting on the track can be solved with tubes
trains can be remote controlled - which means dead-end rail into some military/police containment zone track if necessary within seconds at that speed.
trains have a "dead-man control" which require the train driver to give life signals every 30 seconds, or the train stops.
if you have to stop a normal train, you`ll have to turn off power _AND_ block the rails, in case its a diesel
if you have to stop a maglev, just turn off the levitational power. *griiiiiind* - this things get all they need from the rails.
maglev is a lot more efficient with travel than planes, since it can be stopping just about everywhere with just a few minutes delay - planes take 30-60 mins. and still suck when it comes to sec-checks.
the only problem now coming unto us: what rail size standard is going to win ? we had a lot of different track-sizes in europe, and at least 3 are still around - trains and streetcars, plus some special uphill trains in switzerland.the other misconception is linking airports to cities. replace the airtraffic, people, link the short range targets like paris, london, frankfurt, berlin, brussels, warsaw etc. this will get a lot of traffic out of the air and the overcrowded skies. did you know frankfurt airport, london heathrow and anchorage are each having an airplane start less than every 60 seconds ? at least we want to get the people of the skies, then there is less chance for terrorists - you can always keep dubios packages on the ground, and scan them
regards, rc@europe
That comment was, of course, only the first scrap of a litany of "if only we had super-duper high-tech trains in the USA". (Yeah, it's News-for-Nerds, should I be surprised?) But sometimes a rather good, low-tech solution is also possible. It is less sexy, and less likely to have a corporate lobbyist selling it, but it is probably the best choice.
Recently, some boosters were clamoring for high-speed rail between Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C, so that we could have a sexy train in time for some Olympics or somesuch. The projected cost ("projected" in this case is a euphemism for "wildly optimistic") was something like $4,000,000,000. There have also been proposals for high-speed from Washington, D.C to Richmond, Virginia, which would cost similar large piles of money.
How about something simple, like adding the overhead wires and such so that electric engines can travel South and West from Washington, D.C? Currently, if you travel through Washington, from any big Northeast ciy, and try to continue South or West, you will learn that they stop for a half hour in D.C., while they unhitch the electric engine, take it away, bring a diesel engine, hitch it, test it, yadda yadda. During most of the half hour, the coaches are sitting there, unpowered, unventilated, unlit. It does not make a good impression, and it is not speedy.
Btw, no one ever died in a derailment, that's true. It even derailed at 300km/h but due to its structure it doesnt lay on the side, it keeps standing and stops. It derailed something like 10 or 15 times in 20 years also, thats kind of a record!
Last but not least, it goes at 300km/h all way north to south of france: 1027km in 3h30 from Lille to Marseille. Of course, every french people pay in taxes about 150euros/year (that 140USD) for that (9 billion euros of subsidies for SNCF last year).
Maglev are even more expensive, so dont even think about it: great tech, but no big deal compared to old tech being cheaper anyway.
http://www.pageliberale.org
How susceptible is such a train to sabotage? Would a one-foot diameter rock tossed into the center of the tracks derail the train? It's difficult enough securing airplanes when you only need to check the departure point. How do you secure hundreds or thousands of miles of rails?
The railways are controlled by the government, and look at what we have there. Extremely outdated trains, EXTREMELY high cost of travel (you can almost travel cheaper by plane), poor service....this is what standardized government controlled mass public transportation gets you. If anything, the government should let go of the rails and let independent companies fight it out. If you want to see how fast a high-speed mag-lev train can get implemented, that would be the way to go.
> The main problem of the system lies in the fact that at speeds above 300km/hr the magnetic system
> creates a drag of its own
This "problem" is inherent in any electric motor, and that hasn't held back extremely high RPM motors. The problems with the Transrapid aren't technical but rather economic. It is absolutely crucial for Thyssen to refine the track technology and make it cheaper and more lightweight to produce. If they could halve the cost of track, they could be in business. But unfortunately it seems that a fair bit of self-interest is in the way there, since they seem to be expecting to make a killing on building tracks for customers. They got really pissed when China insisted that tracks be produced locally, using a lot more concrete and a lot less steel than planned to bring costs down. Thyssen was hoping to be selling China a crapload of steel on top of the Transrapid. It really seems to be a case of conflicting self-interests; they want to sell the Transrapid really badly, but they're also in the steel business.
You need to build the mass transit as the city grows, so as to dictate development along rail lines. In the Bay Area you could never get useful rail transit now - the area is too dispersed...there simply isn't the density needed to make urban rail realistic.
Raygun did nothing that caused anything. S.U. actually dropped their expenditure during carters time frame and droped it further during rayguns time. They were already bankrupt.
Now, GWB puts us back into deficit spending.
The Japanse maglev trains have always been flashy show pieces, out to establish new records and such, but have never been ready for production. Yes, they hold the fastest land record, but they've had a slew of technical problems, in addition to a catastrophic fire a few years back. On the other hand, the Transrapid has been technologically ready for prime time for years. You've been able to take public rides on it for a long time. The Japanese track is much bulkier and even more expensive per km, and as the Transrapid seems to be failing on the cost of the track, I can't see how the Japanese could succeed--unless it simply becomes a matter of "beating the Germans", cost be damned.
We have several ppl in our government now from Enron (the morally and fiscally bankrupt). Our policies change to drilling everywhere and dropping support for alternatives fuels. hummmm....
How many times must we be short sighted
Link. See the item in 1993.
The The US is a capitalistic country leaning towards fascism. UK is a socialist system leaning towards fascism.
Attention moderators! The parent post contains a reference to "The Simpsons"! You should have modded it up to at least "+4, Funny" by now. If you're not going to take your moderator duties seriously, then please mark yourself as "Unwilling to moderate" in your preferences.
The data presented in the referenced paper are for accident rates at level crossings. In practice, this has very little to do with the presence or absence of high-speed rail service. Fatalities at level crossings are higher in regions where there isn't sufficient infrastructure funding to provide grade separations between high-traffic roads and rails, or automated barriers and lights.
Getting hit by a freight train at 60 km/h gets you just as dead as getting hit by a bullet train at 300 km/h.
Some useful statistics might relate PASSENGER-miles (or km) to PASSENGER fatalities, not level-crossing fatalities to train-miles.
~Idarubicin
> In Star Wars terms,
> Europe = Corusant
> America = Tatooine.
I haven't the faintest idea what you meant by that. Here are a few of my guesses:
Europe is growing to grow to be the 'centre of the universe', while America will turn into a desert?
Europe is inhabited by evil scheming political types, while America is inhabited by whiny farm boys, old jedi, and really fat fetishists with big tongues?
Europe is the capital of global oppression (turn the clock back 100 years) whereas America is the birthplace of galactic freedom (in the form of a whiny farmboy)?
Or is it merely about population density?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Most of the drag is caused by the turbulant high pressure boundary layer near the trains skin, you can (in theory) suck this into the tain and eject it out the back to reduce drag. NASA have tested aircraft using this apprach a couple of times, currently using an F-16XL. The problem in aircraft is making the gear to do this light enough to give a net benefit. Personnally I recon 500kph would be enough for now, better to make use of the air (using Wing In Ground effect) to save fuel. Once up to speed stub wings could generate enough lift to keep the train up reducing power consumption (or allowing more power to be used for forward movement)
I apologise for the shamelessly stupid bit of typing 'growing to grow'. In my defence, I have unwittingly served as further evidence for how bad exam revision is for the brain.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
The Acela has all business-class seating, very large windows, and is very quiet. There are no rules about standing or walking around.
Quite a few of the seats are configured in facing pairs around a "conference table" which is nice if you're in a small group, or can snag a table to yourself - plenty of space to lay out laptop, newspapers & magazines, and food and drink. The regular seats may be better for pure laptop work, though, since their tables are more like airline tables - they fold down over your lap, which is a bit better positioned for typing.
They also have (sometimes?) a "quiet car" where cellphones and other noisy distractions are forbidden.
Doc Brown's train could do that almost 20 years ago.
("rails? where we're going, we won't need rails...")
Well sir, there's nothin' on earth like a genuine, bonafide, electrified, six-car monorail!
Mono D'oh
The Japanese made a couple of mistakes however. First their track switching technology is cumbersome. They literally move concrete barriers around to shove the train onto another track. Secondly, they didn't design their magnets correctly and so have had problems maintaining them. Those problems aside, the Japanese have done a first rate implementation job.
The Germans, in an attempt to circumvent the Powell and Danby patents and cut costs, chose a conventional electromagnet approach for their maglev solution. Powell and Danby had considered eletromagnets and rejected them due to inherent limitations. First, electromagnets aren't anywhere as strong as superconducting magnets so the gap between vehicle and track is much smaller. Secondly, a power loss would be catastrophic. Thirdly, the way the Germans have approached maglev using magnets to attract each other, requires active controls. The intra-magnet gap has to be maintained to very close tolerances otherwise the train gets pulled into the track or falls away from the track if it veers too far. The tolerance problem will be especially acute in seismically active locations like China and California where tracks will drift slightly on a daily basis.
Powell and Danby have kept working at maglev despite paltry American support. Their website describes several design changes to their original idea. They've designed all electronic switching equipment that makes dynamic track switching feasible. That's advantagous on a heavily traveled track that's being shared by express and local trains. They've also re-arranged their track to a monorail cum flatbed design to support dynamic switching.
Their website describes a variety of uses for maglev. Among them is a trans-continental vacuum tube that enables coast to coast travel in under an hour. The vacuum is necessary because as the train speed increases, the majority of power that's required to move the train is spent moving air out of the way. An evacuated tube makes it possible to move a train across the continent using the equivalent of 20 gallons of gas.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Lincoln authorized the construction of a transcontinental railroad. At the time, it was considered technologically impossible given the chasms and mountains that had to be crossed. Lincoln initiated the transcontinental railroad in the middle of the civil war. Part of his motivation was to demonstrate that though engaged in war, the United States was great enough to concurrently tackle a monumental engineering task.
Fifty years later, we built the Panama Canal, another technological impossibility. Finally 50 years ago, Eisenhower authorized the interstate highway system and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Fifty years have passed since this country last undertook a major infrastructure challenge. Whether our generation steps up to the plate and makes a significant contribution to the infrastructure as our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have done remains to be seen.
Train quality varies across Europe. In the UK, it's pretty poor, with a recent increase in accidents linked to badly managed privatisation and a company called Railtrack who stopped investments in the basic maintenance required for a safe service. But then the trains here have been going downhill for a long time here generally, particularly in comparison to the rest of Europe.
All across continental Europe, you'd be right to compliment the trains. France, Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have perfectly good systems in my experience (sorry about the random selection - I don't normally travel by train and there's a lot of Europe I haven't been to anyway), although Romania is a bit ropey.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
I'm currently working (as an intern) at General Atomics in San Diego, CA. I am working on a small scale prototype for an Urban MagLev train (max speed ~55 mi/hr). Its a much much cheaper technology than what is used in Japan and Korea. We hope to have it working by the end of the week.
Japan has been in competition in the bullet train arena with Europe, usually being beaten by Germany.
Maglev trains have been in development for a couple of decades now. Japanese development on the maglevs slowed down each time there were accidents during experiments. The maglev trains (originally called "linear motor cars" in Japan) levitate, then propels using magnetic fields, allowing for greater acceleration without the heat/sound problems and acceleration limitations of conventional propulsion by rail friction.
(lacking time to create a slashdot account:
davep@quik.com)
In comparing train (or air) stats, it is
critical to comapre multi year smoothed averages.
A single year can be Good or Bad, because the
INCIDENCE of instances is low. US data, year
to year, routinely bounce up and down by 2 or
3 to one, year to year.
(I've 50 years of US data, a few years of
international. Also need to be sure how
trustworthy some of the stats are...)
As a reference:
US rail is roughly 10x safer than, eg US auto.
Similar ratios pertain in other countries,
tho not exact.
best
dwp
the us is not all farming country. we have our dense population areas, like the north east, and the california coast.
SO high speed trains do make a lot of sence in a lot of places in the us.
I've just been to cahighspeedrail.ca.gov and I have to say, the splash photo on the front page looks pretty much identical to a Eurostar... in fact, the background behind it looks suspiciously like the London Waterloo terminus too...
james
Absit Invidia
with the train floating 10cm over the tracks So how am I supposed to flatten my pennies?
On top of that, this train really isn't on the rails in the first place, so I wonder what would cause it to derail? (maybe track imperfections or huge magnetic/electric disturbances?) And if it did derail.. that would be one heck of a crash at that speed..
Contrary to post-Regean political thought, I bring these two up to point out that a private company does not automatically implement things better than a public agency. In this case, the city government did much, much better, and have been for 25 years. (An amusing side-note is that BART is extending its lines down into Caltrain turf, and Amtrak sued to stop them.) We (the US) have a long and sordid history of propping up Amtrak, just to keep the rail system going. We should get some actual engineering talent into relevant government agency and then construct the trains via the public sector rather than the private. It's been done before.
except the WTC had a big ol' subway station underneath it...
Yes folks, that's right, YOU! can own your very own GorkySParc, the 4 bit microprocessor from the good old CCCP!
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This message brought to you by the People's Republic of North America. All hail primier Gore!
Somehow, the Mile High Club seems a lot cooler than the "Ten Centimeter High Club"
This term is usually reserved for systems that measure passengers per hour rather than flights per day ...
In addition, how many airports are in the city centre?
London, where I live, has 1.1 million passengers inbound to the centre of town every single day. So in one working month it takes what heathrow does in a whole year and that's a gateway airport for europe and one of the busiest in the world.
scale, scale.
i got a free parking space in fukuoka for anyone who's interested...
I work for Alstom Transport and this http://mercurio.iet.unipi.it/tgv/rec-intro.html
h appened about 12 years ago. Yippeee!! Like it was great news... Slashdot as usual...
The pictures on the California highspeed rail site are actually of a EuroStar.
I don't know about anyone else, but for me it's that I need my car to get around my area (metropolitan Denver/Boulder, Colorado) in any reasonable amount of time. Our mass transit system is great if you, say, live in the southwestern suburbs and work downtown (or vice-versa), but it sucks if you need to go any substantial distance.
An example: I used to live thirty miles away from where I worked. The company gave all the employees free bus passes, so I called up the local mass transit people and asked about routes, times, and so on.
I would have wound up changing buses three times and taking about two to three hours--one way. I'm a big fan of the environment, but I decided to save myself three or four hours of commute time a day and drive instead.
(I later moved to within five miles of work so I could bike in or take one bus...and they laid me off four months later. That's another story, though...)
Not funny! Yes Redundant and Offtopic!
Gamers will be able to download it here.
Here is the speed recording chart of the record.
Maglev is simply too expensive for what it does; unlike the current TGVs and ICEs, it is NOT compatible with the current rail network, so one cannot go high-speed for most of the trip, then go to another town not served by the high-speed line. Maglev is just an excuse to spend lots of money to featherbed unemployed aerospace engineers.
Maglev has also a very big hurdle: the size of the switches, which makes it impractical to put enough on a rail network to make it flexible and efficient enough.
And even if maglev was practical, the higher speeds yield a diminishing return on the gain of time; since to halve the journey time, you have to double the speed, soon enough, the cost of going much faster will outweigh the advantages of doing to.
And then how fast can you go? You clearly can't have a supersonic train, unless you don't mind the reaction of the people who live near the tracks... The only way a maglev can be practical is underground, within an evacuated tunnel; there, the speed limit would be twice the orbital speed at the distance the tunnel is from the center of the earth, which is several orders of magnitude greater than the speed of sound. But to get such performance would call for a level of expenditure several orders of magnitude of what such a high-speed service would be worth.
of Amtrak doing something almost right. The Northeast Corridor is the only profitable route for Amtrak.
This is a good article written on the topic of Amtrak, its 87 VPs, its end of subsidization, and what must be done moving forward.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the Acela
Nanotubes? I don't think so. I've seen a few pictures of french people and none of them exploded during the flash photography process.
www.teachinjapan.com
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Sorry, but commuting on japanese trains is not fun, with laptop or otherwise. i would stand to argue that, in fact, laptop makes your life a lot worse, because, frankly, it tend to get shoved around and squashed when the train gets crowded -- and oh boy it gets crowded. cell phone w/ internet might be okay -- even though i did not have a cell phone while in japan so i do not know this. as for being crowded, i mean, they have "pushers" for crying out loud. (pushers are people that help push others onto the train, to ensure its sardine-like packed-ness.)
not as bad as the buses in china, though
(and yes, i speak from experience, not a "tourist" experienc either)... tokyo rush hour is nothing to get excited about.
secondly -- beside the "no fun", they are by all means not cheap. a commute from tokyo (shinjuku, anyway) to Kumagaya (one way) is over 20 dollars on JR, which, length wise, is similar to two trips on Metra in the chicago area from end-to-end; metra ticket, twice, would cost ~$12; less if you mingle in some CTA (chicago transit) $1.5 tickets; so, no, i would not say that the train is cheap either.
but they are convenient, similar to manhattan, but without the "maybe that man there is thinking of robbing me / pushing me into the tracks for sh*ts and giggles" sort of way. and yeah, they are exceptionally punctual. obsessively so, i might add.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
There is *no* way you get from downtown SF to Oakland airport in 14 minutes on the BART. Heck, bart.gov puts the Embarcadero station to Coliseum at 18 minutes, and then you've got the minimum 10 minutes for the AirBart shuttle to the airport.
Mind you, living at Union Square I'll still pick Oakland over SFO anyday.
When a corporation goes into bankruptcy, and the remaining assets cannot cover the outstanding debt, it is the debt holders, and not the public, that absorbs the loss. That's no different from a person with more credit card debt than cash filing bankruptcy -- in this case, the credit card company takes the loss.
Similarly, I don't pay for the cost of pollution caused by my car, just as a corporation doesn't. I'm not saying that this is a good situation, but it is the current reality.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
...an 11cm or larger rock accidentally or intentionally falling on the track?
up here at Brookhaven, when they want to run the RHIC (world's largest particle accelerator), they need to truck in a whole shitload of liquid helium, since our (fscking HUGE) LHe plant can only put out enough to fill 50% of the magnets, and it absolutely sucks power from the grid (i believe it's electric consumption alone when it's running at 100% is seriously pushing a gigawatt). RHIC is slightly over 2.5 miles (4km) around. :) (jiggawatts!!)
there aren't any practical superconducting wires that will work at 77K (LN2 temp); RHIC uses specially extruded NbTi wires, which 'go' at 11K. so let's say somebody somewhere, europe, japan, usa, antarctica, wherever, builds a 200-km maglev track. where are they going to get the constant helium supply to cool the magnets? i suppose you could build LHe plants the size of ours and put them every 3km, but they'd have to be cranking at probably 70-80% 24/7 to keep the magnets full, and that's gonna hurt the power grid. let alone the riders, who are going to end up footing the power bill.
and i don't think we can run the plants off lighting bolts, yet
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
no, all you need to do is crack a baseball-sized hole anywhere along the tube or vac system. let's say you have a maglev tooling along at 22,000mph (orbital speed) and you instantly vent the vac-tube. kinda like reentry...only instead of gradually slowing as the air gets denser, you're suddenly at full surface pressure. a body slamming into that much air that fast would probably vaporize instantly (IANA physicist, but c'mon).
and don't even get me started on the logistics of keeping a 4,000 mile x 30 foot tunnel under constant hard vacuum...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Hmm.. isn't that what the folks did there in the 1800s, after the stagecoach and before the car and plane?
Just a thought...
I don't know if 30 minutes qualifies, but I can tell you I've gotten vouchers for the full amount of my fare, sleeper cost included, for a train that was a couple hours late. And I've gotten partial-fare vouchers more than once as well. See http://www.amtrak.com/about/satisfaction.html
In terms of customer service, within the past couple years, I've had MUCH, MUCH better luck with Amtrak than with airlines.
At one time, there were two groups developing maglev systems in Japan. The government sponsored maglev which primarily relied on magnetic repulsion to levitate the train, and a private group (Japan airline I think was a cosponsor) using magnetic attraction.
I got to sit on a short test-track version of the latter system in Japan. I think around 1986 (there was a World's Fair IIRC).
It was the most incredible mass-transit experience in my life. The thing accelerated faster than a 747 at takeoff. And there was absolutely no sound or vibration. It was almost as if gravity suddenly went sideways as you were pressed against (or pulled away from, depending on your seating orientation) your seat.
Gawd, I sure hope a Maglev goes in between Los Angeles and Las Vegas and/or San Francisco. There used to be constant talk about it during the 80's and early 90's. Though not much these days...
preach it brother!
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
Aircraft have to beat aerodynamic drag also, which I guess they do by flying where the air is thinner. But aircraft also generate extra drag with their wings for lift. A mag lev train wouldn't have this added drag. So a little jet engine should power it along nicely.
;)
Of course a ground effect vehicle would be way cooler
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
which (as you would know if you read the article) has been betteb by this magic train, 550ish!
:)
Frogs trying to sound smart
is a very light train design with coupled cars (like some busses) first introduced about 40-50 years ago. It is a very successful and smart piece of spanish technology which is being updated to run at 300-350 km/h on the new line Madrid-Barcelona if the government gives them a slice of the biddings. I've heard that for a time they leased trains to prospective buyers in the USA. This train -like the italian pendolino- runs faster on normal tracks than conventional trains. could it be that the Amtrak train which has been mentioned several times is actually a Talgo?
where did the guy who wrote the article took physics?
he should know that you can't write kph that not a unit!!
k is for kilo = 10^3
so, what he wrote means 10^3 per hour.. witch is nothing to me...
he should have written km/h!!!
or if he want to use per meaning / than kmph but i never saw nobody using it.
well, maybe the guy confused himself with mph and km/h...
In the excelent game, Railroad Tycoon, maglev was one of the options for a train, however, its price tag was far to high to be practical. Only on long trips where the fares were expensive enough to warrant high speed was it practical, even then it was a money losing venture most of the time, as it was difficult to get all the cars full. So, considering that video games are 100% true to life, I don't expect this whole maglev fad to go very far.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
the original poster wrote:
a handful of these trains derailed, and no-one got killed
parent link points to a partial derailment, not full, in which the train only fortunately did not jack-knife.
still waiting for a link to full train high-speed derailment w/o casualties , which I believe is quite impossible...
Working for necessity's mother.
Tatooine has very little infrastructure, and the primary form of transportation are individual vehicles, e.g. speeders, speeder bikes, dewbacks, etc.
Corusant is a highly urbanized place, where although there are individual vehicles, for the sanity of existance there must exist public transportation that is utilized.
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
Most of the drag is caused by the turbulent high pressure boundary layer near the trains skin
Interesting, although I thought the drag was due to a laminar boundary near the skin. The dimples disrupt this and produce a turbulent boundary, thus reducing the drag.
I am a Karma Library.
> still waiting for a link to full train high-speed derailment w/o casualties , which I believe is quite impossible
It's just possible that the reason nobody has provided a link to such an incident is that the TGV has never had a full train high-speed derailment? Perhaps YOU can provide a like to such a derailment where there were fatalities?
As an occasional victim of the sick joke that is the British railway network, I find the TGV's safety record to be outstanding.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Switzerland - do you still have to switch off the engine of your car every time you stop at a red light? Does nobody realise that's INCREASING pollution?
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
> Another reason is there are cute girls who go up and down the aisles selling snacks
But Japan's swimming in cute girls even when you're not on the train (the cutest girls I've ever seen was working as a bellhop at the Tokyo Prince hotel a couple of years ago)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
It's just possible that the reason nobody has provided a link to such an incident is that the TGV has never had a full train high-speed derailment?
I hope that's the case, but if so, the original grandparent poster made an over-general remark.
Perhaps YOU can provide a like to such a derailment where there were fatalities?
definately not, I'm neither an expert on TGV nor BR nor any other railway network, I just read a comment which appeared (from a physicist's point of view) extremely unlikely. Strange enough, the fact no link were given strengthens that view.
As an occasional victim of the sick joke that is the British railway network, I find the TGV's safety record to be outstanding.
congratulations to the french if true, but my post was not about the full safety record.
Working for necessity's mother.
> I hope that's the case
So do I. I certainly have no indication either way.
> the original grandparent poster made an over-general remark
As you yourself quoted, the original poster wrote:
a handful of those trains derailed, but no-one was killed...
Which is accurate - I can't find any way to read it which is "over-general".
> I'm neither an expert on TGV nor BR nor any other railway network
Nor am I.
> I just read a comment which appeared (from a physicist's point of view) extremely unlikely.
As a physicist, you should realise that evidence was given which maintained the assertion that was made. There's evidence that there have been no fatalities due to derailments - Which is the assertion which was originally made (the OP didn't say "Nobody will ever be killed as a result of a derailment of the TGV")
> the fact no link were given strengthens that view.
Huh? You can't provide experimental evidence (which is effectively what you're asking for) without performing the experiment - in other words, putting people on the train and derailing it. Now, the French have many flaws, but I don't think killing themselves for your scientific curiosity is one of them.
> congratulations to the french if true
What has been asserted would appear to be true. We have no evidence one way or the other regarding your question.
> but my post was not about the full safety record.
Your post was, apparently, about what appears to be a hypothetical situation.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
the OP didn't say "Nobody will ever be killed as a result of a derailment of the TGV"
no, but he said the trains derailed, not a part of them. This is a concrete statement, not hypothetical.
Huh? You can't provide experimental evidence without performing the experiment - in other words, putting people on the train and derailing it.
as a side note, crash tests are being done with dummy-dolls, but I digress.
which I did NOT suggest.
anyway this thread has become uninteresting, let's discontinue it.
Working for necessity's mother.
> no, but he said the trains derailed, not a part of them
Talk about splitting hairs. The common usage of "train derailment" (in English) includes partial derailment. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "a train was partially derailed" - and I live in a country where we have a rediculous number of derailments (partial or otherwise). If the OP had presented his case as a scientific thesis, I might be able to accept your nit-picking, but it was a comment on a thread.
> as a side note, crash tests are being done with dummy-dolls, but I digress
You can't kill a dummy-doll (I presume you mean a crash-test dummy?).
> anyway this thread has become uninteresting, let's discontinue it.
You discontinue a thread by not responding to it. If you wish to discontinue the thread, then don't respond to this. If you do respond, I reserve the right to respond to your response. Or are you trying to silence me because you don't like my opinions?
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.