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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.
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
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.
It's a really big and slow airplane.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
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...
Don't believe that trains will make cars dissapear. I live in Belgium and used to take the train daily to commute to Brussels. Do it by car ? no because it's 1) too expensive and 2) there is a major traffic jam that warrants sometimes double commute time by car as opposed to train. But even with a very good public transport system, the streets are still packed with cars and it can take 2 hours to drive 30 miles. So that's why trains are popular: cars stand still and trains are cheaper. This has nothing to do with freedom feelings at all: I rather drive my car than a train but sometimes a train is just much easier. Also, parking lots are less abundant than in the US, you can easily spend an hour finding one, and then you have to pay, pay, pay.... Last week I drove to Paris by car (everybody told me to take the train)... I drove 2h30 to get to Paris and 1 hour to get to my hotel. By train I would have made the Brussels/Paris trip in 1h30 and I would have been in my hotel much sooner. Reason to take car: I wanted to visit some places outside Paris, inside Paris, you don't need a car, you take subway, taxi or walk (if you have ever driven in Paris as a non-Parisien you'd know what I'm talking about)
core dumped.
Furthermore the aerodynamic drag turns out to be a much more important factor than they first expected.
:)
I don't see drag as a serious problem since the only thing cooler than a high-speed, levitating train is a high-speed, levitating train with golf-ball dimples.
I am a Karma Library.
This picture actually shows Eurostars in London. I hope California didn't pay a lot for their virtual railway. (just kidding)
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
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
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.
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.
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.
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?