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Transrapid (MagLev) Test Successful In China: 405
theBunkinator writes "Use your favorite translator (+ unit converter) to read about the first successful beyond 400km/h (~250MPH) test of the MagLev train in China. News Blurp in German at tagesschau.de. The offical Transrapid site is bilingual, with choice of German/English. Pictures & Video, too. Beats the Autobahn any day. Probably beats a plane in many situations as well."
which is described here. And it's network described here
none Yet.
Please note that you can already travel at 300Kmh using the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, 'High Speed Train'), in France, since since 1980...
Not 400Kmh, but it works very well.
More informations can be found here.
(There is a nice flash map of the french railways).
I'm missing something ???
The French TGV already drove over 515km/h.
And that was in 1990 !!!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The cruising speed of a typical commercial jutliner is about 550 mph.
The speed of sound is about 761 mph (sea level, bleah bleah.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Maglev trains usually run on elevated platforms high enough to let roads and the like pass underneath while still low enough to avoid most birds. That, and it simply looks cooler on an elevated platform as these pictures show... :)
Hate me!
The Transrapid would've cost us about $38 million per kilometer and additional annual costs of $215K. For comparison, ICE train tracks (Inter-City Europe express tracks) cost $16.5 million per km and around $165K annually.
It gets worse. There's a 30km test track in Emden, and the train has never been up to it's supposed max speed of 500 km/h. The distance from the Munich airport to the city center is only about 20km, and the thing needs 5km just to get up to 300 km/h. Planned costs were set at $1.6 billion (with a "B" as in, "bwooaaaahhh!") -- expected costs around 50% more. Planned completion was 2006 and expected 2008-2010.
Munich dodged a bullet, but now faces over a year of public transport hell as the main through-tunnel for all S-Bahns is upgraded to increase capacity from 20 to 30 trains an hour. (All S-Bahn trains pass through this tunnel, resulting in massive delays whenever there's a problem even near the tunnel, which extends some seven stations, 5 in the tunnel and end points.) To make things worse, the video schedule displays along the lines run Windows and crash at least once a week. Luckily, the trains don't.
woof.
There's often a Simpson-esque rally in the US press whenever another country pulls this sort of thing off. People often ask "Why can't we just covert/reuse existing railways."
The problem becomes one of how you define straight. These tracks need to be really straight for long lengths to get such numbers, and while your typical subway or Amtrak route looks straight, that's only when viewed at lower speeds (under 60MPH). Even then, lots of these routes are shaky. Take it up to over 100 and suddenly, it's not so straight anymore.
Anyone who's taken their car to really high speeds on public roads can usually attest that a straight road at 70 isn't as straight at 120.
...has been highly controversial over here. The state-funded Transrapid consortium has developed a high-trech train and then, when asking the German government for a track to deploy it live, suddenly found that actually noone in Germany cared for it.
Germany, being a rather small country, yet with a very high density of population, has a very good and highly accepted high-speed railtrack system. (Japan and France are still far better, but still.) The Transrapid offers very little time benefit per direction, yet requires massive construction work for its tracks. Most people here say - why bother? Why do we have to pay billions of tax Euros for a 30 minute benefit?
The Transrapid consortium has struggled during the last years to find an excuse on where to build its track in Germany and why, and so far, plans are still going back and forth.
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You may like my a cappella music
This story implies that the maglev was running at the same speeds it would operate at commercially. There's a big differance between that and the world speed record. To quote TGV themselves from their site
"Running at over 500 km/h (311 mph) with a specially prepared trainset on brand new track is an accomplishment, but one should not expect such speeds to be possible in commercial service anytime soon."
If the maglev speeds are reproducable in a production - ie passenger carrying - environment then this is a major achievement and certainly seems to be what they are aiming for.
Hmm, 450km/h, 959 persons, every 10minutes a train.
This amounts to a throughput of 5754 persons/h.
For a single lane Autobahn: 130km/h, distance between two cars, 170m. This amounts to 765 cars per hour. A typical car carries up to 4 persons.
3060 persons/h.
A typical Autobahn has at least 2 lanes, several have 3.
This makes roughly 6kP/h or 9kP/h. So one could say a Autobahn with 3 lanes has twice the troughput than the Transrapid.
But, this is the theoretical limit. The numbers for the Transrapid is devised from the implementation with two trains on the tracks.
Double the number of trains you get the the same throughput.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
This train line is actually pretty darn impressive. I was in Shanghai three weeks ago, and to get from the city to the airport, we took a highway that for much of its length runs parallel to the train "tracks". The train's path is, for at least a good portion of the trip, elevated on huge concrete pillars, thus avoiding cows and other earthbound wildlife. The train itself looks pretty cool, too.
Shanghai, BTW, is a very nice city- at least the areas I saw. I got the impression there is, relative to many other Chinese cities, a lot of money there.
Well, I don't know about germany, but here in america we certanly driver closer then 170 meters! Perhaps 170 decimeters :P
Ever learn the two-second rule for driving? The trick is, you're supposed to always be at least two seconds behind the car in front of you, three or four seconds if the roads are slippery or it's raining or dark (or all three).
You measure this by using bridges, signs, etc. as benchmarks -- wait until the car in front of you has passed the landmark, count "one-onethousand two-onethousand", and only then should you reach the same landmark. If you pass it beforehand, you're too close.
So suppose you're driving 120 kph (the usual speed limit on the Autobahn, if there is one defined). 120 kph ~= 33 m/s. So by the two-second rule, you'd have to be at least 67m away from the car in front of you.
Suppose you're doing a more typical speed on the Autobahn (even when there's a speed limit, it usually is roundly ignored). Most people drive around 140 kph (though you usually are getting run over by Mercedes and BMWs doing 200). That's a minimum distance of about 78m, assuming it's a bright sunny day with dry roads.
If it's raining, you should double that; near or below freezing, at least double that again; low visibility, double that once more. IOW if it's raining, freezing and foggy, you probably shouldn't be on the road at all. ;-)
Seriously, if you follow the two-second rule and keep in mind that you're supposed to double it in some circumstances, you're never rear-end anyone, and probably never get rear-ended either (since the person behind you *also* has more warning as a result).
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
How come there aren't any of these in the U.S? I would have thought that U.S being ahead in technology (or atleast money), they would have one of these running somewhere by now.
I wrote about this in a previous article (see the final paragraph). One of the problems (in addition to those already listed by others) is that the US Government wasn't willing to put up any research dollars to fund development of the MagLev train -- the idea for which was actually created at MIT (there's even an old videotape of the minature prototype experiment somewhere). Other governments were more than willing to fund the research even though it was going to benefit private companies. Needless to say, the combination of government money and private companies that look beyond the next fiscal reporting period to determine the allocation of their R&D budgets resulted in the US quickly being left in the dust.
GMD
watch this
You really need to learn more about the MagLev train and what advantages it would offer over "200 year old technology" before you post (and someone mods you as Insightful???). Here's a very brief primer on MagLev that will hopefully help you realize the importance of MagLev. You should do a google search and find out more.
What would you trust more, a well developped and well researched almost 200 year old technology (the first steam train ran in 1804 [schoolnet.co.uk]), or a new, extremely complex technology that has yet to carry it's first passenger???
Who the hell modded this as Insightful? Sheesh!
GMD
watch this
Of course it still can stop, using a normal eddy current brake.