Slashdot Mirror
First Maglev Installation Going Up
berniecase writes "After hearing about the 500kph Maglev in Japan on Slashdot, I caught wind of this installation which is going up in Norfolk, Virginia. It's the first Maglev installation in the US. Here's another photo, too."
The photo made me do a double-take. I thought, no magnet in the world could lift a train that high! I figured slashdot was spoofed until I realized that it was the crane holding the train that far above the track.
Maglevs are more expensive, more complex, and require more power than a standard monorail or lightrail, and considering that even the Disneyland monorail can reach 75mph, what is the point of a 40mph maglev?
[Lyle Lanley] Well sir, there's nothin' on earth like a genuine, bonafide, electrified, six-car monorail!
What'd I say?
[Ned Flanders] Monorail!
[Lyle] What's it called?
[Patty & Selma] Monorail
[Lyle] That's right, monorail!
[All chant] Monorail, monorail, monorail...
[Ms Hoover] I hear those things are awfully loud
[Lyle] It glides as softly as a cloud
[Apu] Is there a chance the track could bend?
[Lyle] Not on your life, my Hindu friend
[Barney] What about us braindead slobs?
[Lyle] You'll be given cushy jobs
[Grampa] Were you sent here by the devil?
[Lyle] No, good sir, I'm on the level
[Chief Wiggum] The ring came off my pudding can
[Lyle] Take my pen knife, my good man
I swear it's Springfield's only choice
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
Monorail!
What's it called?
Monorail!
Once again!
Monorail!
[Marge] But Main Street's still all cracked and broken
[Bart] Sorry, mom, the mob has spoken
[All] Monorail! Monorail!
Monorail!
Monorail!
[Homer] Mono- d'oh!
I wear pants.
`I told those 3-year-olds they're watching a very historic moment,' she said, adding that they may not have grasped the significance.
The significance being that the U.S. is farther ahead of any other nation in developing useful, efficient, profit generating public transportation.
Oh wait....or maybe that this is the only time anyone sees this train and doesn't think: "how long until a bailout?"
I'm a friend of a friend of the working class.
this has been seriously talked about, planned for, for over a decade, and the US is just getting around to starting to build the infrastructure for this?
what with the problems of air travel right now (expense, overcrowding, & safety, to name a few), something like a mag-lev system would be awesome for continental travel; say, LA to Phoenix, DC to Boston etc.
it just makes so much sense that it will probably never be utilized in the proper manner.
*sigh*
When I was a young kid, about sixteen years ago, I was introduced to magnets/magnetism, and like any budding engineer, I asked my parents why couldn't you have a big metal tube that was magnetised 'north', and a train covered in metal that was mangetised 'south'.. no friction!
;-)
They couldn't figure out any reason why that wouldn't work, although I couldn't figure out a very good way of propelling the train at that time. My best solution was to stick a giant fan on the back of the train and have it push itself along!!
It's quite funny, therefore, to see maglev come along in the last few years. I feel like 'I invented it!' Of course, that's not true, but I'm sure lots of people have great ideas without ever learning about the idea before, and then are bitterly disappointed when they find it already exists
Unfortunately, my creative skills have dropped off somewhat in the past sixteen years, and now I'm doing drone work.. hmm.. perhaps these technology companies should be employing some smart 5 year olds..
mogorific carpentry experiments
Don't get on board if you have piercings. Very painful.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
After hearing about the 500kph Maglev in Japan on Slashdot, I caught wind of this installation which is going up in Norfolk, Virginia
Yeah and at 40 MPH, America is _almost_ there!
with a short run track, I expect that it would not be practical to accelerate to 400 mph.
It would probably take as long to merely get strapped in for a high speed run.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
$14 million dollars to transport people 2/3 of a mile. Get a bike, rollerblades, skateboard, Segway or use those two fleshy things that go into your shoes. Why don't they test this somewhere more useful or at least a longer test track.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Sometimes I look at things like this and wonder, "Wouldn't it be great if I could board a maglev in Seattle and be in Chicago in eight hours? Wouldn't it be great if this only cost me a hundred bucks? Wouldn't it be great if I could walk around, sit in a seat that's large enough to be comfortable, maybe get into a serious game of cards? Or maybe even park my car on the train and take it with me for another hundred bucks? I wonder when that will happen?"
Then I realize that people have been asking that for decades, and that nobody's done anything about it. Because we don't give a damn about building new infrastructure, or even repairing the old stuff.
The national highways, power dams, the moon...all that behind us, all that in our past. America's lost her ambition. What a shame.
Finding God in a Dog
Wouldn't it be pretty easy for some malcontent to kill hundreds of people by parking a car or hoisting some other heavy object onto the tracks of a 500kph train? You wouldn't even need explosives. The bodily trauma of violent deceleration in a train car careening about at 500kph is surely enough to kill anyone.
This seems like it should be a huge issue. Airplanes moving at 500kph are largely safe because (a) it does so when there's nothing to run into but air, and (b) it's extraordinarily hard (though obviously not impossible) to intervene maliciously with their normal operation.
How is this problem being addressed in Japan? Or is it? Or am I just paranoid?
I'm not impressed, really. I can see the strings.
"Derp de derp."
what are you talking about? The Seattle voters passed the monorail initiatives TWICE, but the fascist city council killed the monorail with numerous "feasibility studies", sending millions of dollars to their "consultant" cronies.
cpeterso
The mag-strip on everyone's BART ticket would be instantly erased them moment they stepped on board...
Virginia! It sure will be great to have a bunch of hillbillies running this thing.
"Hay paw! Joe Bob done gots the fly on his britches stuck to the magnet again!"
This Slashdot article is quite USA-centric. If this is truly the "First Maglev Installation Going Up", then how can there exist maglev trains in Japan? Not every Slashdot reader is a USAian.
cpeterso
Except 300mph maglevs already exist...
Someimes I look at things like this and wonder "Wouldn't it be great if I could flap my arms and fly to the moon?" That's about as likely as a maglev from Seattle to Chicago showing a profit on a $100 fare.
I play Nerd-Folk!
I wish I could say that this was new, revolutionary technology. But I can't. I first heard about it close to 30 years ago in Scientific American.
You're right but for me the thrill is not that it's finally being built but that the Americans managed to catch up. For those unfamiliar with the maglev story, here it is:
Decades ago MIT came up with the idea for the maglev train and even went so far as building a scale-model prototype (there is actually a black-and-white film clip somewhere of it in action). However, funding dried up and America decided not to pursue the technology. Hey, everyone loves their car, right? So why bother building an expensive mass-transit system. Of course, the answer is because not every country in the world is as obsessed with cars as America. Germany and Japan both realized the potential market for this and began development. And in contrast to the Americans, researchers in those countries actually had the full support of the government. Japan and Germany have no qualms about using government money to help subsidize non-military commerical technology. By the time America started to realize that maglev could be a great new market, they were way behind.
But somehow, and I don't honestly know how, they have been able to catch up to the frontrunners. Everyone loves an underdog, right? Even if USA isn't the first one to field a system, I'm still impressed they were able to realize their mistake and come from behind.
GMD
watch this
No no no ... It's a Buttered
Cat Array. The toast is incidental to the design.
I'd put the crane on a maglev train. Problem solved!
"Old man yells at systemd"
>north attracks south, south attracks north..
>jeez you're an idiot
I'm speechless.
Or should I spell that "speachless"?
Wasn't there a Godwin-style law that said that any spelling flame will, itself, contain a spelling error?
Something like that, at least. Er.. at leest.
-l
I didn't know CmdrTaco was a BBC editor:
The two cars hovered just a centimetres above the track, kept their by magnetic force, providing a smooth ride.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Here in Germany, where high-speed trains are fairly common (the ICE2 goes up to something like 280 km/h, or about 170 mph, though only on top-quality track), there has been some debate for some years about building a maglev passenger train -- but the usual NIMBY problems keep coming up.
To add to the irony, the Greens -- who you would think would want to support mass transit, especially one like maglev -- have often blocked its implementation in Germany on environmental grounds (disturbing habitats, etc.).
There there is the situation in the USA.
On the other hand, maglev could in theory revive passenger train service in the USA. I believe that one of the main reasons it has failed in the States is simply economics -- because of the greater distances involved, the net cost per mile of track, the total cost to maintain a (much onger) average stretch of track, and therefore the ticket price for getting from point A to point B is higher than in Europe, where population density is far higher and a greater potential for train service exists. Another drawback in the States is again because of the distance: with Amtrak's usual trains (which are abysmally slow by European standards) it takes forever to get anywhere. So you pay more for worse (slower) service, and the train company has less surplus money to invest in new technology or track improvements. No wonder Amtrak is so terrible.
(Consider the irony that the USA is generally considered to have the most modern freight rail in the world -- but passenger rail is a joke.)
The initial cost of a maglev line is probably a lot higher, but I would imagine that its TCO would be much lower than conventional trains -- and given its far higher potential speeds, it could really compete with airliners (at least on the East and West Coasts, where there is a high enough population density to pay for it).
But the whole train-related mass transit infrastructure is missing in most American cities (thanks in part to the American love of cars) -- okay, so you got to the main station, but then what? How do you get around? Is there a well-integrated tram/bus/subway/coach system? Most cities just don't have that (certainly nothing like in Germany or France). So even if someone is willing to take the (substantial) financial risk and heavy investment load of building a maglev network in the States, there are still a lot of practical issues to deal with beyond just the train lines.
So, sad to say, even though maglev technology was developed to a large degree in America, I don't see it happening in the near future. In spite of the problems mentioned above in Germany, I do think that there will be several trunk lines running maglev service in Germany in the next few years (probably Cologne-Hannover-Berlin and Hamburg-Hannover-Frankfurt-Munich at the least).
By the way, one of the main companies working on maglev is TransRapid. Check out their site (especially the Projects section) for a lot of info about the subject, including about possible maglev lines in the States.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
it would probabbly mean that it is not (actually we are already pretty sure about this, arn't we?) super-conductor mag-lev, but instead just really, really power-hungry conventionaly electro-magnetic levitation.
This would not, should not, and probabbly could not ever be made into a real commercial train; the margin of safty is simply so much less than superconducting maglev
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You might want to have a look at the German maglev "Transrapid" which is running in circles since 20 years now and will finally be build in China.
It does 310 mph / 500km/h.
http://www.transrapid.de/en/index.html
k2r
A waste - an utterly complete waste.
Think about it - it is a train that only goes 40 mph, only travels a small distance (as one poster here said, he could walk it in 5 minutes), and sucks electricity like a pig. Where are the advantages?
Sure, it looks and sounds cool, but until electricity if free (or near free), it is a near worthless application of the technology (that of magnetic levitation and propulsion - I realise that there ARE some practical uses of the tech, but not "people mover" - yet). What are the advantages of this train over, say, a standard small light-rail train? Or something smaller like a BART system?
If smoothness of ride is wanted, why not use "sprung" linear ball bearing tracks, and a smooth bottom train, coupled with propelling "booster" wheels (like that used to get roller coasters away from the stations) along the track every so often, activated as the train approached, deactivated after it had gone by (heck, make it cheaper - drop the ball bearing track and use good sprung bogeys, with a bottom friction plate on the train).
What further galls me is the idea that this is planned to be extended, for larger area use. The cost for this (and light rail) is very high, but there are other alternatives. Phoenix, AZ recently passed its own "light rail initiative", called Transit 2000 - the original website is gone, but "they" chose to go with a standard light rail system. There was a competing system, which was passed over (more on that in a bit). Funny thing about the Phoenix system - I haven't heard much of anything on it since the initiative passed the voters (ie, the tax got passed) - likely it is being funneled and used to line pockets. Plus, I haven't got the slightest idea how they plan to put it in the area proposed - if you live in Phoenix, and look at the map of the route, you know that there is NO WAY IT WILL FIT, at least not without serious restructuring of a major freeway.
Anyhow, as far as the other system is concerned? The other system was Doug Malewicki's SkyTran. The concept seems sound, he has presented his plan in a clear fashion on his website. I still hope one day he will get the funding to make this invention a reality (hell, if he could just sell his Robosaurus he could probably get a prototype going)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
the one time I could have gotten a story posted on slashdot and I don't even recognize it. I live in the city next too Norfolk, Portsmouth. they were originally trying to sell this idea to Virginia Beach as a way for tourists to get around but it jsut wasn't practical. So then they sold it to ODU (Old Dominion University). from what I understand this isn't costing ODU anything which is great. Whats sad is I've known about this for like a year or more and jsut didn't think it that noteworthy. cool things happen here all the time. :)
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Maybe not the long-haul airplane routes, but high speed rail hits a sweet spot on those 250-400mi trips, where your choices are drive 5-8 hrs or fly an hour and wait a few more hours getting in and out of the airport. LA to Vegas in 2 hrs or less? Lots of people would pay for that.
Of course anytime you have a 200-300mph vehicle hurtling along the ground, sabotage and accidents are always a concern. But then conventional passenger trains are vulnerable to the same things to a lesser degree, and maglev track would be more durable than a conventional high speed rail because of no wheel contact.
There seem to be 2 main camps when it comes to mag-lev.
1. You put the propusion/levitaion in the car.
2. You distribute the propulsion/levitaion between the track and the car.
#1 while being more challenging from a performance standpoint, has some pretty hefty dollar per-mile advantages. I think this type of design is more likely to be put into use here in the US. TCO is likely to be low. A track maintenance problem would likely be nothing more than alignment or (if the track supplied power to charge the batteries) power delivery. But because of the engineering issues (greater car weight leading to most of them), I doubt mag-lev will come to the US until further advances in power storage and high temp superconductors come down the pike.
#2 Is much 'cooler' in terms of what can be done today, but I imagine initial build cost as well as TCO would be much higher than #1. A track based propulsion || levitation system would dramatically increase the cost per mile of track. Not to mention if there's a problem with the track (an this is more likely with a complex track) that whole run becomes unusable until someone can go out to BFE to fix it. (can you imagine going out to the middle of nowhere to install a new section of track?) TCO would be HUGE.
Just because someone in Japan has run a 300mph maglev, doesn't mean another person in the USA can build a 300mph maglev without doing a 40mph one first. Its gonna have to be (re)invented here before we go and spend government money deploying it in anything more than small scale.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
What happened to the big scare about electromagnetic radiation? Remember the stories about people getting cancer from living underneath power lines? Rememeber people getting their houses checked with gauss meters? These folks are sure to come out of the woodwork if maglev trains are ever built.
During the first trial run they had the power turned up too high on the magnets. You can see in the photo that the train is levitating a good 15' above the track. This caused stability problems and the power has been reduced in subsequent trial runs.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I have a much better and cost effective solution!
/. readers: You get karma!
MahaLev: Maharishi Levitation, teach everybody
Transcendental Meditation - get a yogi to act as a conductor,
and have everyone onboard chant "aaoouuumm" as the train raises itself from the tracks.
And as a bonus for
embiggens .. something about such and such embiggens the man or soul or something.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Thank you for pointing it out - maybe I should pay attention to the maps better. There isn't an I-17 path.
Hopefully what you say about the Red Line will carry over to the light rail. I am also wondering if in the future the line will be extended to ASU West - would make a good way to get between the two campuses.
As far as Anthem/I-17 - hopefully this thing will be extended in that direction in the future. Should be interesting to watch...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon