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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."
"Magnets: Not just for your fridge anymore."
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which is described here. And it's network described here
none Yet.
Passengers can now go 405 kilometers before they're hungry again.
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).
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.
If anything this thing will make airtravel therefore easier by getting people to and from the airport faster.
I recently had to go to london from amsterdam and checked out the three different methods. Boat, train (via channel-tunnel) and plane. Plane beat the other by a few hours. Mostly because of the number of transfers(?) and the inevitable waiting time this entails, required in the other two.
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5 or so years ago this would have been reported as
"Under the guise of a civilian transporter the Chinese goverment demonstrated a potentially terrible military weapon, capable of accelerating several tonnes upto half the speed of sound"
Just think, if Iraq had just done this we'd declare war.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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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If your goal is just to reduce friction, why not simply float the train on an air cushion, like a hovercraft? It seems like it would eliminate a lot of the complexity.
The air cushion could be fairly efficient compared to military hovercraft, since the ground clearance could be an inch or so, instead of feet. Your track could be prepoured concrete instead of electromagnets.
I'm probably missing something.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
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.
At least it wasn't:
404: Maglev not found
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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."
which china do you mean? not the china that has the fastest growing major economy i hope...
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
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.
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'd rather have slower trains with better coverage/low prices than an insanely expensive fast train that doesn't run anywhere near where I live.
High-speed trains? Don't expect my support until the NJ Transit Raritan Valley Line is electrified and goes direct into NYC. (A much easier project than building a maglev or upgrading tracks to high-speed capability).
I have a train line 10 minutes from my house. It's great, despite being a non-direct diesel. The Northeast Corridor is faster and would be nice, but the NEC is "fast enough" without having super-expensive upgrades being done.
Also, for long distances, trains just don't compete economically in the US. Amtrak (the only long-distance provider) has prices that are on average equal to or greater than air travel. In a number of areas you can compare Amtrak prices directly to local commuter rail - On the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey, NJT does New Brunswick, NJ to NYC in only 10-20 minutes more than Amtrak. NJT's round-trip price is 1/4 that of Amtrak's one-way.
The problem is that Amtrak has to use their profitable lines (NEC, etc.) to subsidize the much less profitable (in fact, overall money-losing) Midwestern lines.
I think the solution is to give up on rail where it won't work - For long runs in the Midwest, air has won and trains can't compete. For selected areas (Northeast Corridor, i.e. DCNYCBoston), form smaller companies to operate those lines. They can probably offer the service at much lower prices then, which will provide a large gain in ridership for those lines.
Unfortunately, thanks to Amtrak's prohibitive cost, it's cheaper to hire a limo service to go from central Jersey to Washington, DC (Yes, people do this. Apparently a significant portion of the business of many of the area's limo services are now for DC runs). It's faster to drive than take the airplane, and while the train is the fastest, it isn't worth the insane cost. Train travel could easily beat air travel in the Northeast, but it has to be reduced in price so that it can compete first.
retrorocket.o not found, launch 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!