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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
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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.
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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.
but can it be made safe against terrorists?
No. We should never do anything ever again, just in case someone decides to break it.
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
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...
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
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 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.