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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."
Well you could say that about the US building the A-Bomb right after Depression and during the hard years of WWII...
Or about Soviet Union building up satellites and sending the first man to Space...
Besides, the train AFAIK is built in one of the richest parts of China. And China is quite big and possesses a huge contrast in cultures, economies and resources. So I don't see a reason why they wouldn't loose some money to build a Maglev.
If you consider that they should "feed the poor and then think about progress", I sincerly consider it populist demagogy. No country has ever solved this question by putting its feet into the swamp of development. On the contrary, most socialist countries who tried to follow such path went nearly bankrupt. The only way to give people a better living is to push every possible path of development forward. Wealth does not rise from "more equal distributions among the people" but from the development of infrastructures with far-reaching effects among the population. And Maglev is one such infrastructure. This system allows common citizens to have a better and speedier means of transportation. This system demands better enginners and technicians. This system is a challenge for lots of classical means of transportation. This system is a path to new scientific and technological researches. And more, this system allows people the use of faster travel, which may be much more economical than other means with the same speeds and approximatelly the same service.
So this might be one of the things that may rise their GNIPC a few dollars more.
The Transrapid was ready to market in 1980. Nine-teen-eighty, I say. Endless debates and 22 years later it finally gets implemented. Of course not in germany. At least this time it's the chinese and not the americans that get it on with german tech. :-)
That been said, it shure is an engineers wet dream and a beaty in means of transportation. I'd love to see this baby ready for use throughout central europe. Cars are outdated. Germans, for instance, spend 4.5 billion man-hours in traffic-jams per year! It's really time we got puplic transport to be the way to travel.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
An advanced rail system like this might be slightly ahead of its time for China if the marketplace alone were determining when some company would build it.
It's kind of sad, though, that here in the United States we probably won't see anything like this for many more years.
It's strange, though. The Peoples Republic of China is a mixture of a market-driven and command-driven economies.
Likewise in the United States, where heavy government subsidies in the 1950's built up the interstate highway system.
Now, of course, the automobile dominates passenger traffic and the trucking industry dominates freight and our potentially efficient rail infrastructure is a government-subsidized crumbling ruin that neither the auto, trucking or oil industry is interested in seeing re-emerge.
But railroads will re-emerge as the most efficient means of transportation for people and freight. Computer controls for regulating rail traffic will succeed sooner than they will for automobile and truck traffic.
All it will take for the re-emergence of rail in the United States is some painful increases in the price of oil. Then we can go to Europe, Japan and now China to learn the technology that we've been neglecting.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Health problems: No. The main RF hazard is radiation powerful and high-frequency enough to heat your tissue. The magnetic field has yet to be demonstrated harmful, though many continue to try. (I used to work with MRI, which involved a 1.5 Tesla superconducting primary magnet.)
;-), and so on. Sadly, it was 9/11 that gave trains a boost, when airports became even more aggravating. The train's time will come. ("We have the technology. We can rebuild [it]."
Why not here: Lobbyists. On one hand you have the money-losing Amtrak, on the other the money-losing but politically influential airlines. More important than airlines perhaps are those who really fear roads: the automobile industry. That industry includes not just auto mfrs, but also tire mfrs, gasoline suppliers and vendors, and so on. Rail service has a much smaller umbrella.
America is stalled on rail because for years roads were emphasized, and subsidized. Los Angeles, where I grew up, is the classic example of car dependency and mediocre mass transit. People say that areas such as these are "not suited to mass transit" but forget that the layout of the city was determined by cars. Thus cars lead to more cars. In balncing one form of transportation against another, the hidden cost of pollution and auto fatalities and such are rarely assessed. (Yes, people die on trains, too.)
In the Northeast Corridor, where I now live, trains should totally overcome the shuttle, which offers almost no time advantage for a downtown DC to downtown NYC traveler. The problem facing Amtrak, which is only one of many users of the lines, was to get funds to upgrade and electrify the tracks. Congress resisted, citing their operating losses and thus confusing annual deficits with capital investment. Over $2 billion was required to introduce Acela service, which still can only travel at a fraction of its normal speed over much of the route because of antiquated curves and grading.
I don't endorse Amtrak, but see that its challenges are not fairly apprised. being subject to political control, for example, it must maintain unprofitable routes, while not being able to fully exploit the profitable ones, or develop new prospects. Even if Amtrak is successfully denounced, if anything that strengthens the case for rail by implying unexploited possibilities are there.
I love rail service; you get a first-class (big) seat, can get up and walk around, can arrive 30 seconds before the train rolls, don't have a safety lecture about the motions to go through before you die anyway
I rode a Japanese maglev demo track in Japan, around 1985. The system worked very well, and I've been a believer ever since. It glides with an unspeakable smoothness. If you didn't look out the window, you wouldn't even know that you're in motion. (Well, except during speed changes -- during departure "takeoff", you're pinned to your seat like a jetline taking off, but without the jet's vibrations.)
To declare the maglev dead on the basis of the costs and untested-ness of the first designs is ridiculous. The first commercial jet airplanes were expensive and guzzled fuel -- and the industrial infrastructure wasn't yet there. Many years later, with successive refinements in technology, and gearing up of supporting industries, modern jetliners have pushed down the costs of travel and transport to incredible new lows.
When the Havilland Comet and the Boeing 707's first came they were immediately popular, but had their share of detractors. It took successive generations of planes, notably the popular 727's and the 747's to really show off the potential of jetliners.
And then there's the fleets of 737's that let's us now freely move about the country on low-cost airlines.
Granted, train tracks are fixed and can not be "rerouted" to quickly adapt to changing markets. But where there are markets with enough current air/car traffic (Eastern sea-corridor being the obvious one; So/No. California and Las Vegas being a likely candidate), the maglev is a potential optimization.
I for one would love to use the Maglev to go from L.A. to S.F. Trains are likely to have higher up-time and lowered cycle time compared to airplanes, and would more likely have last-minute "walk on" convenience (even in today's security-minded environment).
Let's just be glad the Chinese are willing to take the first-mover disadvantages on new technology problems and costs (they clearly want the first mover advantage on prestige and willing to pay for that). From their experience, only improved systems can result!