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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.
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!"
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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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...
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).
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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Vietnam - 5.29 fatalities/million train-km
Thailand - 1.05
Bangladesh - 0.66
Netherlands- - 0.28
United States - 0.25
India - 0.21
Iran - 0.11
Japan - 0.10
France - 0.05
Russia - 0.01
The U.K. - 0.1 fatalities/million train-km
The safety record seems to be significantly worse than some countries, but then again it's significantly better than others. It all depends on what you're comparing it to I suppose.
The future isn't what it used to be.
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)
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
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.
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.
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