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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
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
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.
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.
So baby, wanna become a member of the 500km/hr club?
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
"It's a really big and slow airplane."
Nah, it's a really big and slow RAILGUN SLUG!
graspee
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
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!"
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.
Well, from a political point of view some people might consider the UK to be more of another state of the USA than a full member of Europe.
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).
TGV :
:
Commercial : 360kph
Record : 515kph
Maglev
Commercial : none
Record : 550kph (as stated in the article)
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)
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!
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.
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)'
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
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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These trains travel at 500 km/h, not 500 mph. So they really only travel less than twice as fast as current shinkansen.
g le v_frame_E.html
There is a lot of interesting information about the technology on this page:
http://www.rtri.or.jp/rd/maglev/html/english/ma
My other first post is car post.
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)
It still happens though and makes the evening (always the evening) commute hellish.
I have been pwned because my
I think you're attributing way too much to the same old worn-out cultural stereotypes.
Come on, it's pretty simple. The country's size, population density, and cost of land make railways ideal for both inner city and inter-region transport, and private automobiles relatively inconvenient.
Japanese would eagerly commute by car if it were worth the cost and time, and in many suburban / rural areas and smaller regional cities that have outgrown the rail systems that serve them, people are starting to do that. People tell me that these days you "need" a car if you live outside of Tokyo (e.g., Saitama, Chiba)
And even the most car-spoiled, fierce individualist American will eagerly give up driving and start using the trains in Tokyo.
No, the Mallard set a steam record of 126mp/h (202km/h) in 1938.
HH
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...
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
Nevermind that most of us in any major city actually spend most of our time backed up in bumper to bumper traffic because EVERYONE feels they need that freedom they saw on the commercial.
Or the little matter that once you have got to your destination you need somewhere to put the car.
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.
"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.
Maybe time to reconsider seatbelts on aircarft. These trains trains are still slower than 560 mph.
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.
You need special tracks for trains such as the shinkansen, TVG, etc anyway. On regular tracks you'd be limited to whatever the track can cope with. Possibly 100 mph, possibly a lot less.
This is what the Eurostar has to do.
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)
They did the tests on TGV track. In France the only trains to use these tracks are TGVs.
So it all depends on how realistic the speeds are in a real world setting. A TGV would derail at the same speeds a Nozomi shinkansen takes corners. (I know, I konw, due to track guage it would never fit on the tracks in the first place, but imagine that it would.)
It would fit on the track fine, Japan uses the same guage as Western Europe (and the US).
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 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
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.
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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 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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
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
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.
Yeah, and something tells me they aren't planning any grade-crossings at 500 km/h. A lot of this is probably cultural too. How many drunk rednecks are there in Russia who try to race trains at grade crossings? Until recently, Russia's equivalent of the redneck couldn't afford a pickup. Maybe these stats will change over time.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
www.teachinjapan.com
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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.
When there's no hope of profits, there's no measure of what's important to the customers and what's not, so you get pathological behavior like money wasted on massive vanity projects while important infrastructure issues are left undealt with.
But I don't buy the conclusion from the article you referenced, "The loss of the ability to choose to traverse this incredible continent from the safety and comfort of a glass topped Domeliner, sipping a Martini while taking in our fruited plains, spacious skies and purple mountains majesty instead of being crammed into a smelly overcrowded airliner would be a great loss for us all." That's not a very convincing argument for spending trillions of future tax dollars on a national rail infrastructure.
Instead, they need to figure out what the purpose of tax-funded rail transit is - if there is one - and come up with clear guidelines for minimum standards that such a service has to provide, and perhaps more importantly, what it should not try to provide. They then need to fund it to an acceptable level. Underfunding something like Amtrak simply sets it up for failure, which is then used as proof that it isn't viable. Lack of sufficiently clear and specific goals guarantees that money won't be well spent.
I happen to think there probably really is little or no place for long-distance passenger rail in the current USA, outside of dense corridors like the Northeast.
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.)
I think this is unfair. Sure there are exceptions, but in the vast majority of trains in Japan you will never have problem getting a seat.
As for "pushers", I believe there are only a couple of stops in all of Japan that need them and only during certian parts of the day. I know for a fact that there are no "pushers" in all of Osaka, and that is the country's second biggest city.
Prices too, are not bad once you get away from some wierd places in Tokyo. $20 where I lived could take you on a three hour long journey from Kyoto to the top of lake Biwa in Shiga. If you are commuting six hours every day, there and back, I have a feeling that the $40 you pay is the least of your problems...
And in Japan, the alternative would be much worse (cars are expensive, and you basically have to buy a new one every three years becuase of insurance laws, and that doen't even begin to consider the $5.00/gallon gas prices, OR tolls) in terms of price, so they do end up being signifigantly cheaper.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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...
You can't buy Assault rifles from your corner store anymore... So? I hate to tell you this, but while Americans were proudly upholding their constitution rights to carry Really Big Guns(tm), everyone else grew up and decided that giving Uzi's and Grenades to schoolkids isn't really a good idea.
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!