Slashdot Mirror
Money Problems May Derail First U.S. MagLev Train
PSaltyDS writes "The Virginian Pilot is reporting on the trials and tribulations of what was supposed to be the first MagLev train in regular use in the U.S. The MagLev Project was to cover a portion of the Old Dominion University campus, and start service in 2002, but after $14 million spent, it has yet to carry a single passenger. In the article, several engineering types seem to say the same thing, something like 'A great idea that is just too hard to do without an unlimited budget.' Is a maglev train an impractical fantasy like the personal flying car?"
Don't the Japanese already have one? What do the Japanese have that the US does not, to allow them to create a MagLev?
Seriously just go with the best most practical solution
What do the Japanese have that the US does not
bouncey pixelated boobies?
A monorail! MONORAIL? Yes! A monorail!
The only trains that survive are local trains (like the BART) and subways really...but for those purposes there is no reason to have a MagLev system--it is too costly to implement for such a small project. magLev would be great long distance, but again, planes are still more popular and don't take up real estate on the ground.
Trains, planes, and automobiles...the first of the bunch is just dropping out of the equation here in America.
FUTURISTIC MAGLEV trains that zoom along guideways at 300 mph on a cushion of air have been heralded for more than three decades as the next global transportation revolution.
But the only version that was hauling passengers -- a low-speed, half-mile people mover at Birmingham International Airport in England -- was junked four years ago in favor of a standard shuttle bus.
Such setbacks haven't dimmed the ardor of international proponents of high-speed maglev (short for magnetic levitation), however, and in fact the chances to build the first systems in the United States seem tantalizingly close. Seven projects, awarded federal grants totaling $12 million, are competing to win $950 million more next year to design and start construction.
One of the seven -- a consortium beginning to build a half-mile test track in Titusville, Fla. -- includes the Long Island scientists who invented much of the original technology. "Within two years, we will have the first working maglev system in America," boasts promotional literature from the consortium, Maglev 2000, which also includes the state of Florida and Dowling College's National Aviation and Transportation Center in Oakdale.
Physicists James Powell and Gordon Danby, both then at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in 1968 pioneered the use of "supermagnets" intended to lift entire trains and whirl them along a guideway. An Army Corps of Engineers report said maglevs could exceed 500 mph when fully developed -- head-spinning ground speed for moving people and goods.
But the United States abandoned its efforts in 1975, and Japan and Germany have dominated maglev research ever since; Japan has built upon Danby and Powell's ideas while Germany came up with a rival technology. Either country could have systems carrying paying passengers in the next few years,but hurdles in funding, politics and environmental protection remain.
There are some technical problems that need to be worked out on test tracks, including stabilizing the fast-moving trains on the air cushion, assuring they can negotiate curves smoothly and developing complex switching networks for trains to pull off main lines and into depots. The Birmingham minisystem was replaced partly because of technical difficulties.
But renewed federal interest is sparking new hopes for maglev in this country. Two years ago, a panel of experts named by the secretary of transportation concluded: "The long-term development of magnetic levitation transportation in the United States is critical to addressing the nation's long-term transportation needs."
Powell said he believes that by midcentury, as regional maglevs emerge, one might be built the length of Long Island, moving freight and passengers swiftly to connecting points such as Grand Central Station and freight depots. Ultimately, the Florida consortium proposes a 20-mile project linking Port Canaveral to the Kennedy
Space Center and Titusville Regional Airport.
Other U.S. applicants are pushing visions including a 45-mile system between Pittsburgh International Airport and the city's eastern suburbs, a 40-mile run between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and a 75-mile system connecting Los Angeles International Airport to downtown and points farther east in Riverside County.
The federal support has limits, however. Under the law, it would pay only for guideways; state and private sector funds would have to pay for cars, stations and the rest. Congress could also decline to start parceling out the $950 million; the impending retirement of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), a champion of maglev, could delay the U.S. catchup effort.
Most of the delay in maglev's debut elsewhere has come down to money and environmental concerns. Construction of the German Transrapid system, after years of tests up to 300 mph with people on board, was to begin this year but was stalled again in recent weeks amid battling over the proposed $6 billion, 185-mile Berlin-Hamburg route.
And powerful environm
...ignoring the existing half-dozen working solutions in preference for pissing millions of dollars on a homebrew solution.
Even more stupid is insisting on a maglev solution when there are equally fast and substantially less-expensive traditional solutions, aka the French and Japanese bullet trains. One of those puppies just broke the 500kmh barrier with passengers.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
A timely article on why Maglev is ready for use in the United States, what it will have to compete with, and why people will or will not use it.
Shanghai
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Which if i recall correctly has several routes working right now and recently beated the world record for speed with a new route... ;)
Lyle Lanley: Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car Monorail!
What'd I say?
Ned Flanders: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
Patty+Selma: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: That's right! Monorail!
[crowd chants `Monorail' softly and rhythmically]
Miss Hoover: I hear those things are awfully loud...
Lyle Lanley: It glides as softly as a cloud.
Apu: Is there a chance the track could bend?
Lyle Lanley: Not on your life, my Hindu friend.
Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lyle Lanley: You'll be given cushy jobs.
Abe: Were you sent here by the devil?
Lyle Lanley: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
Wiggum: The ring came off my pudding can.
Lyle Lanley: Take my pen knife, my good man.
I swear it's Springfield's only choice...
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: Once again...
All: 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!
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Yes, yes it is. Someone better go tell the Japanese that their train doesn't exist...
Ahaha, that's great!
I'm going to use that as a template for randomly insulting people when I don't want to put any effort into it. I'll just replace [atheists] with whatever group I want to insult, and [christian] with whatever thing I'm presently supporting that could be in any way construed to be the antithesis of the thing placed into the first [].
This Sig Kills Fascists
Impractical fantasy? Japan, Germany, Britain and many others all have them... Certainly not impractical nor a fantasy; more likely mismanagement of funds?
So is Tennesee.
Maglev transportation has been something people have talked about for like 3 decades now and it still hasn't been fully realized in the way it's been portrayed. I doubt it ever really will be. I see it as akin to supersonic flight -- it's faster, but the costs of using it outweigh the benefits in most cases. If you had listened to some of the people around when the Concorde was introduced, all flights would be using this now. It's just not realistic.
I predict there will continue to be only a few, very specialized routes that utilize maglev. I would imagine there are less than 20 routes in the world where maglev truly makes sense.
of course, we can all see that the much more practical alternative to the maglev would be the segway. it's only $4,000 and ships in less than 24 hours.
Don't even try to argue. It is NOT worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
I take it that you haven't spent a lot of time in the Bar Car on the train then? It is a real blast. You can tell who the drunks are because they are the only ones walking straight. Now on the flip side, I was once on a Greyhound bus when a baby in the aisle across from me shat his pants. It was barely tolerable until the mother changed the litle tyke right there on the seat beside me. Half the bus was hurling including yours truly...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Seems we heard the same thing from the guys at Ampex about video tape. It's just too damn hard to make a reliable video tape deck for consumer use. Who would want the thing anyway?
The Japanese have a working Maglev train. Damn fast too. I believe it holds the world record for trains at, what, 580 kph? Must be they didn't get the word that it was just too hard, eh?
I guess like everything else, we can just buy it from someone who knows what they are doing. America is fast becoming the land of movie studios (foreign owned, of course), walmart, and a humongous military-industrial complex. Too bad the Japanese won't let Americans move there...
Colonial Williamsburg sounds like a natural, more authentic location for such a maglev. Harkens back to a simpler time as we fondly recall our forefathers tooling around on their personal hovercraft.
You are Exhibit A in the case for his argument. You really just can't stand it can you?
"an _impractical_ FANTASY"??!
Bah!
I'm building one in my garage! Does THAT sound like an impractical fantasy!
Naysayers... sheesh.
( of course mine is being constructed with legos, and isn't quite capable of flying an ant... YET! )
Passenger trains my be unpopular but freight trains currently carry a large portion of the goods in the USA.
They are not going anywhere.
for the future.
Japans ability to build for the future is why they have this.
I live in Oregon. We have a rail system thatw as very expensive, and some people think its waste.
I beleive in 20 years, the local people will look back an cosider it a fantastic forward looking idea.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Did some kid put a penny on the track?
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
How about you stop crap-flooding slashdot, get out and talk to people face to face. Then you will realize that they don't care about your beliefs.
The people who seem to want this maglev transportation system seem to do everything in their power to make it sould stupid to the public.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
There is money to be made (or saved) in public transport. There are several routes right now that are crying out for fast efficient public transport where maglev is the best answer (London Commuter Corridors, Germany Inter-City and New York to Washington). These are routes which people will pay for faster services. Someone just has to have the willpower and political stamina to bring it to fruition.
Like any new technology, the first one will be expensive and probably not the fastest. But this technology has to start somewhere.
Wait, I'm not sure if this is just someone that has gotten too used to UK government programs, but isn't $14m a bit early to be quitting? I mean, most of our projects run into the billions before anyone bats an eyelid
The japanese already have oe. It has been clocked at 581 kmph on a speed run. The americans should spend more time befrending the japanese or employing some of their engineers, rather than wasting the money they have so far with no results.
I couldn't think of a sig.
Your comments are indeed appropriate for the NYC to Boston segment, but between Trenton and Newark, NJ, the Amtrak caps out at around 120mph. 10% of Pennsylvania's easternmost county, Bucks, commutes to the NYC metro area, thanks in large part to Amtrak. Not to mention the cost of living.. I always tell people I pay a near-rural cost of living with a midtown salary.
You will never ever see the entire DC-to-Boston corridor converted to maglev because the last leg of the rail-based system has a lower speed limit. That's just ridiculous.. try taking the train to Philly one day and you'll see what the rest of us have been enjoying for decades.
...for monorails not associated with magic castles.
There's still a great deal of life left in traditional high speed rail. Maglev may or may not be the solution for the future but it's time has not yet come, except on the densest corridors. All rail needs big capital expenditure for maintenance and development. But paying all that money for quality rail services is a whole lot better than congested roads or the inexcusably high pollution that is produced by air travel.
The Birmingham airport maglev (1984-1995) was more ambitious. And it was so expensive to maintain that it was replaced with a cable-driven system.
The only maglev system being proposed that makes any economic sense is the link from Orlando Airport to Disney World. Disney wants to build that so that their customers bypass all other attractions and go directly to Disney property.
Let's just try that template once, shall we?
You can't have a civil discussion with an Christian. Christians like to think of themselves as rational, but if you observe their behavior you'll find they are anything but. They are full of anger and bitterness, and react with frightful outrage whenever they encounter someone with different views from their own. Even people who think that Christianity is a reasonable philosophy must admit that most Christians did not arrive at their point of view through anything resembling a rational process. Rather, they are poorly socialized individuals who are lashing out angrily at anything which is valued by mainstream society. You really shouldn't take it personally. It is the result of an angry and profoundly unhappy psychological condition on their part, not due to you or your Atheist beliefs.
Hey! You're right! The template works great!
Last year, we decided it would be nice to take Amtrak for a visit to Chicago (from St. Louis, MO), rather than drive all the way up there.
I've always liked trains, though I almost never ride them. I was really looking forward to this opportunity, and was quite let down.
For starters, the train was at least 15 minutes late arriving at the station (in Kirkwood). Then, we were told that Amtrak trains to Chicago never really leave directly from Kirkwood's station. They have to first travel to the downtown station. (So in other words, more wasted time before we really got under way.) The downtown St. Louis Amtrak station is a disgrace. It looks like an old tin shack. Ever since our original station (Union Station) was decomissioned and turned into a shopping mall, Amtrak has never bothered to replace it with anything remotely decent-looking. Then, our train stopped out in the middle of nowhere for at least 30 minutes, waiting for the track to clear up ahead. (Perhaps another Amtrak train broke down? They never did explain.) Then, there were all of the scheduled stops at little stations where it seemed that nobody got on or off anyway. The train cars themselves were at best, in "average" condition. They reminded me of old seats on a bus that needed a good cleaning or reupholstering. By the time we finally arrived in Chicago, I was *very* glad to be off the train, and felt like driving would have been the superior experience. (I still had to get a rental car for the rest of our Chicago trip anyway.)
It's obvious that Amtrak has NO clue how to properly run a public transportation system - and they're rather perpetuate the belief that trains just aren't profitable anymore than take the steps needed to succeed. I really hope they do go bankrupt and govt. doesn't bail them back out. Maybe then, a private investor will buy up the right-of-ways and equipment and run it like a real business!
Ok, so I forced myself to read the entire article, not easy, its a collection of confused finger pointing, and poor journalistic sound bites, sole intent to fill a news article. Zero Meaningful Content..
:
To summarize
They are concerned about how the project was managed.
Concerned that the investment may not get repaid.
There are problems with the control system (not the magnetic levittation system itself note)
The assets are apparently a series of patents. Thats odd really, considering this is a tewenty year old technology.
The board and the university may have screwed up, they didn't put appropriate bonds in place, so now they are all nervous as to who gets blamed.
A board member now blames the technology, saying that others (Japan) could not make it work. This is incorrect.
Another guy refused to invest because of problems with the company (not the technology).
Maglev trains are described as "floats on a cushion of air". Duh. Fine journalism.
FRA has issued a stop work order, as usual asleep at the wheel. Way way way too late IMHO.
Overall, they all completely mismanaged this, tried to invent new stuff that doesn't work, and now need another two million dollar handout to get out of the hole they dug for us, the victim taxpayers.
Oh, and in the process they tarnish the reputation of a transportation technology we actually need.
Thanks for nothing ODU and FRA guys. Do us a favor, go fire yourselves.
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
It won't matter what the cost of gas, 5, 10, 15 dollars because ultimately people will pay it when there's no other reasonable alternative.
Case in point: All those toll roads. It's said that the tolls are necessary to keep the roads running, however there are plenty of roads out there that seem to manage just fine on gas taxes.
So why the extra $$? To cut down on the usage of the road! Force people to use more public transportation. Guess what? Places like the Northern Virgina Reston/Tyson's Corner toll road in Virgina are still bumper to bumper even though the tolls keep getting more and more ridiculous.
Of course, the only alternative if you live in Reston and want to get to DC is to take a bus... On the highway... Which.. Is.. Full of cars! Grrrrrrr.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"because it is an innovative approach to moving people in an innovative and efficient way."
Efficient, at least in economic terms, usually means that it is the best possible use of resources. Spending $14 million on a project that has so far yielded nothing hardly fits that definition, especially considering how many shuttle buses, gas, and driver's salaries could have been purchased with $14 million.
I have blog like everyone else
Is a maglev train an impractical fantasy like the personal flying car?
Absolutely not. Maglev trains have been successfully deployed in Japan, and as more municipal areas show interest, the technology will become less expensive.
Flying cars were a pipe-dream to begin with. The issue there isn't really technology - that could be developed. The issue with flying cars is feasibility. Creating an infrastructure of landing strips and air traffic controls would create logistical problems. The inability of most individuals to afford flying cars has hindered their development as well. With maglev trains, an entire city collectively finances the project, and the entire city then uses the trains.
Look at the link there, and the article on the Old Dominion fiasco. Yes, the Japanese train works very nicely on a test track. They've had 30,000 test passengers over N years. They're not running it as a fully-deployed production system, much less a profit-making one. It's very cute, but it's not even as practical as the Disney World Monorail.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The hard part is building and maintaining the integrity of such a huge global network of underground tunnels. That probably means we'll be waiting a couple decades for the nanotech breakthroughs that allows us to easily "eat" through miles of rock and then build-by-numbers bottom-up.
Imagine feeling weightless in your seat as your train approaches orbital velocity.
--
Power to the Peaceful
But much of the time difference was because the airports are designed for hurry up and wait - huge parking lots that take time to get to the terminal, lots of waiting in line at the terminal, pre-terrorist security lines, paperwork lines. In DC the commuter flights were frequent enough that myboss and I would aim to arrive at the airport 20 minutes before the flight, leaving 10 minutes padding for a missed Metro connection, but normally you'd need to leave more than that.
By contrast, the train station has parking right next to the terminal, you stand in line behind 5-10 people to buy your ticket, boarding the train takes 1 minute instead of 20, and away you go. Coach seats on the Metroliner are about like first class on airlines (not that it was worth taking first class on the commuter flights), so you've got room to use your laptop, read, sleep, and look at the nice view. Also, the train was almost never late, while the airplanes often were delayed by weather.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Adds companion Ulli Schonart: "They built this all in less than two years. Amazing! In two years in Germany, we'd just have a plan for the evacuation of the birds along the way." "
lol
Heh. That Simpsons episode came out about the time Newark Airport ripped up all its parking lots to build a monorail. Eventually they finished it, after I'd moved to California, and the construction was much more annoying to parking lots used by locals than to rental cars; I don't know if it's better than the old busses were or not, but it's no real advantage for rental car users.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
nt
What about the Chinese Transrapid maglev (built by a German company) now running on a 30km track between downtown Shanghai and its airport.
You can fit 150 japanese people into a single train compartment. You can only fit 75 obese americans into a compartment. Plus there is space wasted because people don't want to get to close to a smelly minority. Therefore there is a higher profit margin and the japs can spend millions more buying the mag-lev technology from the Germans.
Sure, the Maglevs are great on test tracks - and Craig Breedlove's race cars go really fast in the Utah deserts, too, and Buck Rogers flying jetpacks are great for 30-second trips. But if you read your articles, neither Japan nor Germany is running the things carrying real passengers on real production train service, and the one at Birmingham Airport in the UK was closed down because it didn't work very well. They don't appear to be practical - the Osaka-Tokyo line hasn't been built yet because it would cost $60 Billion, which is high even for Japan, where high-visibility pork-barrel projects get lots of funding.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You can't have a civil discussion with an MCSE. MCSE's like to think of themselves as rational, but if you observe their behavior you'll find they are anything but. They are full of anger and bitterness, and react with frightful outrage whenever they encounter someone with different views from their own. Even people who think that Micr$oft is a reasonable philosophy must admit that most MCSE's did not arrive at their point of view through anything resembling a rational process. Rather, they are poorly socialized individuals who are lashing out angrily at anything which is valued by mainstream society. You really shouldn't take it personally. It is the result of an angry and profoundly unhappy psychological condition on their part, not due to you or your Realistic beliefs.
We don't even have enough users to keep our regular rail lines going without massive government bailouts.
May we never see th
The green movement is always telling us how trains are good for the environment and hence ultimately healthy for us.
What they fail to mention is that standing on platforms freezing to death in the rain and sleet waiting for your train to arrive is bad for your health. They also fail to mention the effect of going to work packed like sardines alongside a pile of coughing and wheezing commuters. Nor do they say anything about the stress of sharing a vehicle with occasional knife and gun-toting juviniles or hard criminals, or just plain abusive or dodgy people.
It's not just theory either. As a freelancer I occasionally take contracts that require commuting by train, along with others where I commute by car. The state of my health directly mirrors the form of transport, and when trains result in a direct and blatantly obvious loss of health then only a fool can consider trains as good.
The problem with public transport isn't that it's public, but that it's mass, packing in everyone like a herd of animals. We're not animals.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You don't need maglev to go fast. The chunnel train connecting London to Paris already has a peak speed of 186 miles per hour. There's no good reason that this same "bullet train" technology can't be used elsewhere. I'd love to see a fast train connecting all airports in the Bay Area to all the airports in LA. Then include Sacramento and Tahoe and Las Vegas. Then start north to Seattle and east to Pheonix. 186 mph is almost as fast as an airplane (250 mph, IIRC) and if boarding times are faster, you could easily save time with the train.
Yes you can do it. They have that kind of technology in actual use in China. Built by a german consortium. But there's a reason this consortium did not get to build one in Germany. You can make one work, but the costs are horrendous. Just like the Concorde's. So, at least for the foreseeable future, it's unlikely you will see this in a western country near you. Not because of physics, but simply for the fact that no sane investor likes the words "unlimited budget".
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
cheap and fast : http://www.aerotrain.net
but doomed anyway...
The referenced link is for TEST TRAINS that do not carry regular passengers. Where is there a MagLev anywhere in the world providing passenger service? This is exactly why I compared it with the personal flying car. We've all seen the Moller SkyCar. It can be done in small experimental scales, but is it too impractical/expensive/dangerous for regular service? On the economic viability especially, what added VALUE does a MagLev have over a wheeled train that makes it worth the high cost?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
- the japanese are doing it right. slow, methodical, engineering-sensible development will probably result in a chuo-shinkansen maglev in 10-15 years at the longest and possibly in as little as 5-10 years. See here for a gentle introduction.
- the chinese are building a maglev shanghai-beijing. every engineer or knowledgable person i have ever spoken to has said that this was a rushed through engineering abortion; an inefficient showpiece really. still, there's something to be said for having it done first, and, if the chinese do it, then more power to them.
- 14 million of research from an ab initio program isn't enough to make a toilet handle on a maglev train. a maglev is something at least as complicated as a 777 given all the supporting things that need to be built such as stations, emergency vehicles, turnouts (switches), safety devices, computer systems, and so forth. 14 million for a maglev project is GUARANTEED not to go anywhere other than perhaps some basic research in electrical systems that the japanese have done long ago.
- a maglev is PERFECT for:
- the US northeast corridor
- london-edinburgh via manchester/liverpool
- tokyo-osaka via the chuo-shinkansen route (duh).
- hong kong - guangzhou - shanghai
Incidentally, I find Japan Railway Technical Review journal to be a well-written intelligent web site with discussion of the true state of the art of trains. Worth a read if you actually read things in more than the slashdot 3-second scan way.<rant>I can't believe I'm the first to mention the fact that trains will never become a reality in the good ol' US of A until Americans can somehow shake the stranglehold that the oil industry has on them (kicking resident Dubya out would be a good first step). That means Americans get to play out the car culture to its inevitable extreme, with severe pollution, road rage resulting from continual rush-hour traffic, etc.
Of course, I might have a different definition of quality of life than most Americans. I don't believe that owning a gargantuan SUV, living in bland, shittily built suburban housing, and alternating between the office and home and McDonalds and Costco is a way of life. If you think it is, maybe you should consider doing a bit of travelling?</rant>
One could use it to ship super-fast cargo during off-peak travel hours.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The Virginian Pilot has a terrible habit of changing the link every time they make an update to a story. The article is (for now) at http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?sto ry=63543&ran=55013.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
A maglev train is technically impossible. Period.
And the speed would squash the air from the passengers' lungs. Furthermore they'd all go mad from the sheer speed. And the cows along the line would no longer give milk.
FYI, there are already maglev trains in operation on this planet. There have been prototypes for decades. Just because American engineers can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done, and just because it doesn't exist in the US doesn't mean it doesn't exist on this planet. D'oh!
For $10, you can travel from New York to Boston in a few hours, about the same time as driving. This is a perfect example of capitalism at work, as there are four or five different companies around New York Chinatown basically charging the same price. It used to be $25 but the whole SARS scare dropped the price, and they still haven't gone back up.
Fung Wah Bus is the biggest bus provider between the two points, but there's a swarm of other operators nearby as well.
Birmingham International Airport had a maglev back in the 1980's. Very cute, technically brilliant and eventually replaced with a bus for simple economic reasons.
Maglev is terribly "neat", but nobody seems to have solved the fundamental problem that if you use just a fraction of the amount of power required to levitate the train to push a wheeled one instead, the wheeled one goes a damn site faster and costs less to run
The Japanese magleve trains have been reported on Slasdhdot science page already. Apparently they are having huge successes with their projects. http://science.slashdot.org/science/03/12/03/06502 26.shtml?tid=126&tid=134
I couldn't think of a sig.
The Iraqis will have one before the U.S., probably built by Bechtel as part of the "democratization" for $87 Billion taxpayer dollars.
note to humour-impaired lame-ass moderators: That was a joke. ODU was clearly part of this mag-lev article.
... is in Shanghai, but it's German. It's called the Transrapid [transrapid.de], and was developed in Germany. It was initially to connect Berlin and Hamburg, but that was not built for lack of funding. I haven't followed it lately, but it looks like they are building something in conjunction with the Munich airport presently. If you click the link above, click on the "Chronology" link on that page to get a history.
German engineering is the best in the world!
"Is a maglev train an impractical fantasy like the personal flying car?" No it isn't, a track was built by Germany in China. Use google you brainless twit.
Shanghai, China's largest city, is gearing up to launch the world's first commercial maglev train, which uses electromagnetic levitation to carry passengers as speeds of up to 430 kmh. The 30-km (18-mile) maglev line, built using German technology from Transrapid International at a cost of more than $1.2 billion, is launching sometime in summer 2003. It enables passengers to travel from Shanghai's financial district to its international airport in about eight minutes. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,57163, 00.html
The reason we (Americans) won't have decent public transportation systems (any systems, not just maglev) for the foreseeable future is that we are too individualistic. We love our cars because they represent our individual freedom, but at the same time we isolate ourselves from others, and we suffer from road rage because of all of the traffic.
We'll have to reach the breaking point in this country - I guess this means the point where the majority understands the inverse relationship between number of cars on the road and quality of life - before good public transportation will become a reality, and by then we'll be angrily clamoring for it.
sig != null
Some of the problems were not Amtrak's fault; it looks like Bombardier had some technical problems with the Acela trains.
-ted
This is very simple: Cost per unit-length of track.
1. The TGV, power is supplied for the on-board motors to generate thrust. Simple steel rails, laid down on concrete sleepers (ties). Static system.
2. MagLev, power is supplied for the entire length of train for levitation, plus locomotion. Railbed is complex and built to high-tolerences.
Which option costs less to run when competion from cheap airline fares already are threatening long-haul rail travel?
Just because something is technically possible, dosen't mean it's economically feasable.
Aeroplanes have taken the high value long distance routes, buses the short hops and cars everything else. The only viable role left for rail is freight. The only thing which rail has successfuly competed against for passenger transport is the horse and cart.
Britain is learning to it's cost that the car, bus, plane (frankly anything but rail) is simply faster, cheaper, more relable, more convenient. Despite this, the current government want to spend 22 billion pounds (Yes, that's around 30 billion dollars) on the rail system, this figure is almost certain to double, they always do.
My advice; Rip up the rails put in roads, add tolls and require freight and public transport to use them.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Imagine if all the funds the government puts into building and maintaining roads were put into rail. It's estimated at between $400 and $900 billion per year -- far more if you include the costs of policing them (and scraping dead drunk drivers off the roadside of them). The 'cost to society' of the great inneficiencies and danger of car travel make the cost astronomical.
Yet...people say rail is outdated becase it's not self-sufficent. Puh-leaze. If 'self-sufficent' means it survives on 'pay-per-use' money from travelers, car travel is about as self sufficent as a 90 year old invalid on a respirator.
They money you pay on your car, gas, insurance, maintainence *and tolls* is only about half the cost of getting you there. The rest comes out of the taxpayer's pocket.
BTW -- I don't have a car, I only use public trans. All your car people please thank me now for paying for your extravagently expensive daily commute with my taxes. Then, apoligize for making me breathe your poison every time I go running in Central Park.
Have a nice day.
maglevs will be an impractical fantasy longer than the flying car will be.
testing out my trending skills
American Engineering SUX.
My state decided it would be wise to put in a constitutional ammendment to build high-spreed rails, specifically mag-levs, across the state in one of the biggest wastes of money in state history. Thats right, our constitution says we have to build a train, regardless of the realities of the situation. Slashdot had an article about it http://slashdot.org/articles/02/08/11/0037249.shtm l?tid=126
How did this get in our constitution? Remember that episode of the Simpsons where the salesman shows up and sings the monorail song? Exact same thing on a state-wide scale.
Railroads have been forced to run unprofitable lines since trains were invented. It's due too two causes:
1) Politics. Every town wants to be close to a line. Even after demand dies out, towns still fight to keep a railstop.
2) Usability. The NEC would make the most money if they only operated peak hour trains, and did maintenance during the day. Luck for us, they realize that less people would take it because they'd be stuck at their destination for hours if they had to go back.
Rail is an unprofitable business. It needs government funds to maintain itself. This has always been the case, except on the local routes previously mentioned.
I had the pleasure of taking the Shinkansen train in Japan about a month ago. The fastest train (Nozomi) uses 4 hours from Hiroshima to Tokyo, about 900km (560 miles). That's 225 km/h (140 mph) average speed, including stops and the speed limit near Tokyo. The Hikari Shinkansen uses 4,5 hours (+ a 20 minute train change in Osaka) on the same route (about 180 km/h (112 mph). The trains do of course stop in the middle of the city.
The Shinkansen trains are way more comfortable than an airliner (unless you fly on business class). More room for your legs than the trains I'm used to.
Hmm, the first thing I thought of as I read this was that West Virginia have a much neater system (not maglev, but much more interesting from a passenger perspective)...
Morgantown, West Virginia Personal Rapid Transit System(PRT)
Anyone on here actually use it?
Americans have a car culture? Then why did my Chinese roommate have to get a car within a month of coming to the US? He lived next to campus close enough to everything you could need for life. The local bus system worked just fine and would get him to any store he wanted. He didn't have a job (his student visa didn't allow him to work) so we can discount needing to be somewhere where the bus system didn't work. (in that city the bus system was terrible, but campus was the one area well served by it)
Answer: he wanted one, so he got one. I rarely drove it, but when he wanted to go someplace he did. He didn't have the government telling him the car was bad, and so he got one for the couple time it was nice to have.
Don't blame americans. Truth is everyone who has access to a car wants one. Where there is good public transportation they will use it, and often the expense of a car is more than the gain. However they all want one because it means freedom to get from where you are to where you want to be when you want to.
I can't stand the ritual humiliation of air travel... you have to be some kind of buddhist monk or masochist. YOU! Back in line, sheep, or I'll perform an invasive bodily cavity search with unlubricated gloves! Spare me.
No, train travel's the way to go. The other day I rode the Acela to Boston, and two guys got on with holstered guns at their hips... chatting easily, and obviously some kind of private rent-a-cop - nobody batted an eye, nobody wet their pants. Of course that might have been because they were all carrying legally registered concealed deadly weapons like me, or maybe the people who ride trains are just braver and smarter than the sheeple that can stand to ride planes. I dunno.
In 1966, when I was nine years old, I took a flight to North Carolina from Philly. My folks dropped me off at the airport and my grandma picked me up in NC. Nobody thought anything of it, and nobody was searched, or had to pass through metal detectors, or stand in lines for hours.
And no, times have NOT changed. There were just as many rapists, child molesters, and garden variety freaks per capita in 1966 as in 2003.
People have simply become fundamentally weak and cowardly these days.
I used to like the metroliner a lot better than flying from DC to NYC. This happened to be the ONLY line that actually made amtrak money. Fast trains, superior service, on time. THe regular trains did suck though.
The US did invest heavily in trains. It was nixed. Probably because of mob mentality. More about that later.
In the 1970's, Secretary of Transportation John Volpe demanded and encouraged and funded LIMRV, Linear Induction Motor Research Vehicle and TLRV. Tracked Levitated Research Vehicle amongst others. Companies including Ford, Garret and Grumman were asked to come up with designs.
Grumman built and tested TLRV, and was tested at 300mph (480kmh).
Garret built a test vehicle had a speed of 256mph (410kmh) in 1965. That is just 12mph shy of a brand new system in China now being readied for use in the Shanghai metro area, but it was done, again, 38 year before.
With the insane resistance to nuclear power (check out France meeting its power needs beautifully and cleanly for a case study as to why to use it), electrical train designs fell by the wayside. The resistance to nuclear power gave birth to the Oil Mafias of today (and the subsequent cartels, OPEC, and undesirable cash flow to undesirable regions), and these trains fell by the wayside.
If you add up all the miles of railroad in the USA, 194,731km/121,000miles, which is huge compared to other companies by raw number or by per-capita (Russia has 87,157km/54,168mi ; China 71,600km/44,499mi ; India 63,518km/39,477mi ; Japan 23,168km/14,400mi ; Germany 45,514km/28287mi ; Sweden 11,481km/7135mi ; UK 16,893/10500mi). Apparently the US does have railway know-how.
I think it is safe to say when large, uneducated public outcry affects the policies of a government, particularly when it is about the root of all economies, energy; you give birth to more evil demons. By creating this negative stigma about the word nuclear (an MRI in a hospital is really an NMR, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging, but people hate "nuclear.") and all things nuclear, you bought yourself an oil mafia, fossil fuel trains, fossil fuel cars, fossil fuel being used to create energy that melts ore into metal for every car, from SUV to Train to Plane to Automobile (about 70% of ALL power consumed in the US is by industry, about maybe 30% is people and their cars.)
Now solving the new crisis will require pragmatism, like wind and nuclear power. But windmills were just recently protested in the Nantucket Sound and despite having personally lived next to a nuclear power plant (there were no cases of thyroid cancer, but several cases of GI tract cancers caused by industrial solvents poured into the water supply) people don't want this new technology, because every time we rolled it out, people bitch.
Think - the SR-71A flew in late 1965 for the first time. No plane to date (except maybe the Aurora) has topped jet engine in top speed. We've taken that know how and for 30 years did other things with it. All was not lost =).
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
With the insane resistance to nuclear power (check out France meeting its power needs beautifully and cleanly for a case study as to why to use it), electrical train designs fell by the wayside. The resistance to nuclear power gave birth to the Oil Mafias of today (and the subsequent cartels, OPEC, and undesirable cash flow to undesirable regions), and these trains fell by the wayside.
Speaking of subsidies, garbage is the other great subsidized industry. That is, the cost of the goods we buy do not reflect the cost of their ultimate disposal. Of all garbage subsidies, nuclear garbage tops the list as the most expensive trash EVER.
When we can figure out how to handle nuclear waste efficiently, then nuclear power will be cost efficient. Hopefully, we will eventually figure out a way to reprocess it into more nuclear fuel.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
One of the reasons that train travel in the U.S. sucks is that there's very little passenger-train compatible track left. Most of the US rail grid has been converted from passenger train use to freight purposes only.
... banking does not help freight use. In fact, banking rail is quickly worn down when such heavy cars move over it, so there's a good reason at least why freight trains must run on flat track.
The difference is that passenger trains should travel on banking rail where the inner part of the curve is set slightly deeper than the outer part. This works great for human passengers in that the apparent direction of gravity in the cars are always down, also in turns, which means the trains can go faster and with greater comfort for the passengers. In the 1950s you could travel from coast to coast in the United States along several different routes of fast, banking passenger-car-friedly track.
These days you'll find that most routes have to use freight track much of the way, and freight rail is flat, because the cars are heavier and move slower, and aren't bothered by lateral g-forces (think Roller-Coaster tycoon)
However, the net result of the obliteration of the passenger rail grid is that passengers on freight track are subjected to lateral gravity forces in turns as the cars cannot bank properly. This makes the ride substantially less pleasant than when it travels along dedicated passenger rails. In order to not cause severe passenger discomfort or injury, the passenger trains in the U.S. therefore run much slower than their european counterparts. Fancy undercarriage suspension work will only do so much.
I don't have reliable sources for the next fact, which is that the passenger trains of the 1950s actually could do the coast-to-coast crossing in nearly 12 hours less than
today's equivalent.
I was on a delightful vintage steam train trip in Germany about 10 years ago - cars and train beautiful old old things from the 1930s. Part of the journey was along modern passenger rail and was as comfortable as any modern train journey, but because this train moved fairly slow and probably interfered with route traffic, we were switched onto a freight line after about half an hour. The change was immediately noticable! People's bottles and cameras and things fell from the little tables by the windows whenever there was a turn.
The reason the U.S. rail net has been 'destroyed' for passenger use is no doubt one of economy. I'm told that only freight transportation is really profitable for most of the trail companies, the operation of passenger train lines are heavily subsidizeed by government. So if bottom line is affected by congestion on freight track along any line, there'll be a tendency towards converting any existing passenger train track to freight purposes.
I live in Japan and I really like the bullet train. Going from Tokyo to Kyoto is great. It is faster than the plane but it is NOT cheaper. We live in Tokyo and when we go down to visit my wife's family in Shizuoka (about half-way to Kyoto) it is both faster AND cheaper to drive rather than take the train (that includes the super high highway tolls). Japan Rail is still trying to get out of its state owned, pork barrel mode and pull its act together as a competitive business.
I'm less concerned about a maglev than the entire concept of High-Speed Rail in the USA. I knew the man who headed up Boston's Red Line subway extension. He also tried to get a high-speed rail program started (CA, I recall).
It's been years, so I'll try my best to distill his takes on rail systems, which I'm sure still apply to even short maglev lines:
- You can spend millions of dollars upon studies (environmental, economic, technological, etc.) and never see the end of them. Hence, you can never get started.
- Even if you get started, it's never supposed to get done anyway. If it was, then all those unionzed laborers, and all those highly-paid execs with expense accounts, will eventually find themselves out of jobs. They will never complete it.
Although particularly pessimistic, I can well see what he talked about with the current state of America's rail systems. Unless we have a sea change in the cultural approach to major transportation systems, we will never have high-speed rail in any significant sense. There are terrible forces at work to at least keep you endlessly mired in the "studies" stage. After all, it is simply part of the pervasive and combined American sicknesses of NIMBYism, examination and authorization.It doesn't even seem to have anything to do with not enough rights-of-way (we seem to have plenty of those).
The point of building a rail line is to build a transportation system and to get it done. It's going to be an eyesore and it's going to be noisy. There are going to be derailments and spills. Deal with it. After all, America is criss-crossed with eyesore, noisy roads with many accidents on them, and we seem to do well enough with those.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
That's what I hate about airports and airplanes. It's not just the hurry up and wait, it's the stress that the place generates. You're constantly worried about being late or missing something. You have to wait in the lobby so long that you'd like to take a nap, but then the plane will probably board and take off while you're sleeping.
The shinkansen (bullet trains) here in Japan run every 5-15 minutes between Tokyo and Osaka. You can buy a non-reserved seat and get on ANY train. Miss the 9:00 AM train? No problem, get on the 9:10 AM train. No security checks, no lobbys, no boarding passes.
San Francisco International Airport takes up about 4 square miles of space. A 2 rail train right-of-way should be approximately 50 feet across so 104 of them side by side should be about a mile wide. Hence, SFO == ~416 miles of train right of way. There are a _lot_ of airports in this country, so I'd be curious to see what the ratio of land taken up by airports vs the amount of land taken up by trains is.
American cities are just plain built differently from others around the world. Quite simply, we've got more (desirable) land per capita than anywhere else, and Americans have the freedom (both social and economic) to go whereever we want to get a piece of land and build our own house on it. It's that little thing called "the American dream," y'know? Our cities are more spread out than others, especially when you get out of the Northeast (not coincidentally, the NE Corridor is the only place Amtrak makes money).
The places in America that *do* have working mass transit have high population density -- not as much so as Japan, but nearly on a par with European cities. High population density means there are enough people within walking distance of a train station to support it. That means the train company doesn't have to build and staff a parking lot, and the potential passengers won't have to decide whether to turn into the train station parking lot or just continue to their destinations in their car. More people using the train ==> more service, at more convenient times.
It's a vicious cycle. I like trains, but if it takes me 3 hours to go from Richmond suburb to Washington suburb by train (presuming I make the commuter train transfer just right in DC) vs. 1h45 to go door-to-door by car, hell, I'd drive even if the gas cost me $40 each way (like taking the train would) instead of the $8 it currently does.
I work across the street from ODU and recently graduated from that campus and the problem is worse than the article makes out. Sure they are a piss ton in the hole on this but the black eye for ODU goes much deeper. The maglev is bridged across a major thoroughfare for Norfolk. Tens of thousands of people drive by every day and look at the eyesore that the maglev has become. The track is not complete and hangs above the road. The station near Hampton Blvd is wrapped in steel support structures because the work of pouring the concrete was stopped in the middle. It has been that way for three YEARS now.
Hard to get new funding for projects when that site greets every visitor to the campus. The other end is in no better shape but at least it is buried deeper in the campus so it cannot be immediately seen. I have heard that they have engineering students mixing concrete by hand trying to finish that end.
I have been following this account for a while in the papers as an student I wanted to know where my tuition was going. So I asked around the engineering friends I had to see what the holdup is. The answer I got made me laugh. Before the project began they very carefully figured out the force to get the car to 40 MPH, they figured the energy to make it float. They then designed the track and started building the car and end points. Only then did anyone do the math on stopping distance for that design. All other designs have been over several miles of track, this one is very short. Turns out that the stopping distance of the car going 40 MPH is greater than the length of track that they have. Regular trains have friction to help in this process; the whole point of a maglev is to remove that friction. Other models have simply coasted for a bit before coming to rest, but in such a short space that is not practical here. They have to figure out how to create a breaking friction in a system designed to remove that friction. Chalk another one up for the engineering geniuses! There choice is to drop the cars speed to 10 MPH or less, at which point why did you build a maglev when a cable car would have been as fast? They are in major poopy and don't know what to do. As to removal good luck, American Maglev did not file any of the other bonds that they were supposed to, what makes you think they filed the removal bond? In short ODU bought a pig and a poke and has egg on there face.
Oh, and of note, where they built it was way inconvenient for anyone to use it anyway. Why wait for a train when you could just cross the street?
Papa Legba come and open the gate
And the big dig is only 3 -4 miles tops.
I'd say 14 billion >>>> 14 million
shang hai maglev train, tops at 430 kph, currently having it's trial runs.
geek page at KY speaks
so the USA gave up on maglev.
;-)
Whats the point in tech if you can't blow people up with it?
The Japs, on the other hand, who spend barely any money on warfare, seem to have maglev well in their, uh, sights.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I'm surprised none of the ODU students have posted about this article. I am local to the maglev train (in Virginia Beach) but DO NOT attend ODU nor have any ties to the project.
The transrapid system in Germany allows public passengers and does 250mph with no issues. Maglev isn't new hat. The system at ODU is different in design, with the guideway aimed at being much lower in cost than the design offered by Transrapid and the like. Basically the guideway is dumb and the train itself contains the logic for stepping the magnets and such. The guideway isn't very large, if you saw it in real life it makes you wonder how wide the actual train is (I haven't seen the train, just the guideway).
The rumors I've heard, but the president of American Maglev wouldn't comment when I emailed them was this: the train worked fine on the test track in Flordia when it was on the ground (it has been demonstrated to move!) but once it was up on the guideway problems hit. Someone told me that what is happening is the rail flexes from the weight of the cars, then the system adjusts for the change in gap between guideway and car, then the change causes the rail to bounce and it enters an oscillation loop..... I know someone that saw it move in Flordia, so it really happened. They just didn't plan on rail flex issues.
The fix is supposidly known, but congress hasn't released the 2 million to them to fix the thing yet. Meanwhile some local companies want payment for services rendered in construction of the stations. Supposidly money is set aside to pay for the entire removal of the project. American Maglev supposidly defaulted on payment in Flordia on their facilities there as well (there are articles on the intarweb from the paper down there casting a negative light on the issue).
American Maglev was trying to sell the Virginia Beach oceanfront resort on the system, but they didn't buy it. It wasn't a hotel or a convention center. Finally years later ODU got involved. While the whole thing smells of Marge versus the Monorail from the Simpsons, really assuming they spent the money properly I would have no gripes against American Maglev.
I personally hope to see it run, but things aren't looking good for American Maglev. If they get this thing moving (which they supposidly have a solution to fix it) then there is the remote hope that our region will become the center of development for the maglev monorail industry.
Also -- if you are in the Hampton Roads area and are a geek, consider joining the HRConnect HR-Geeks mailing list at www.hrconnect.com (under mailing lists).
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Japanese train sets world record at 581 kph
That was set on December 2nd with passangers on board.I'm tired of bombing the universe
Even if the train is electric, chances are that the electricity comes from coal or diesel generators <snip> Trains don't prevent pollution, they just move it somewhere else.
The environmental argument for this approach is similar to the argument for hydrogen / electric cars. If all the pollution is coming from power stations, you need only filter / regulate / maintain the power stations, rather than millions of internal combustion engines of varying age and quality. Also, power stations tend to be built some distance from cities while cars tend to congregate in cities, so city-dwelling humans experience less medical side effects when power and pollution are centralised.
Finally, centralised power gives you an easier upgrade path. When you get economical wind or solar or fusion or whatever, just replace your coal plants and all the electric trains and hyrdogen buses keep working without the need for individual upgrades.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
What was the number one cause of unatural death?
Over 42k traffic fatalities in 2002.
Compare with 3k fatalities in the WTC attack.
cheers- raga
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Isn't this a Simpsons episode?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
In real terms here is the trip from London - Paris. My apartment (Zone 2 Subway) - Inner city paris apartment:
Flight:
20min Tube to Paddington
15min Train to Heathrow
1 hour checking before flight (45min is absolute minimum at heathrow)
1 hour flight
30 min baggage collection and walk to train
30 min train into the city
10 min tube ride to accomodation
3 hours 45 min total
Train:
20min Tube to Waterloo International train station
20min Check in, security and train boarding
2:45 hours Train Journey
5min walk to tube
10min tube ride to accomodation
3 hours 40 minutes total
As you can see they come out about the same. However you are more likely to get congestion on the flight route than the train route (especially now they have opened the dedicated track on the UK side of the link).
[Please type your sig here.]
Doesn't make it practical.
Why do you think that calling it impractical would preclude the existence of such Japanese trains?
Once that happens they will loose big time against 300 km/h TGV-style trains on all distances between 100 km and 1000 km. Below 100km cars and normal-speed trains (140 km/h in the Netherlands) win. Above 1000 km planes are faster than TGV trains even if their inefficient front- and back-end travel is taken into account.
In the Netherlands the trains stop in the cellar of the national airport. They're complementary.
In germany the transrapid wasn't build exept a demonstration installation. the problem is 1. the time you win using a maglev over a given distance compared to a "normal" high-speed train isn't so big, but the costs are much much higher 2. the maglev is completely incompatible to everything else on rails. that means: all new tracks, all new stations, all new technic; in berlin (when there was a long discussion about building a Transrapid Hamburg-Berlin) they would have to break down a lot of buildings to get into the heart of the city and the inhabitants of the flats next to the track (a lot - in a dense city area!) would have suffered from strong noise emissions while there already exists a complete up-to-date railway system 3. the max speed of the maglev can't be reached all the time - if the train goes to a curve it has to reduce speed as any other vehicle does. you can build only VERY big curves to reduce this effect, but you use up much more land (irrelevant to US i know...)etc. while intelligent features on modern trains (like the tilting technique on ICE, Pendolino, TGV) allows much faster speed in curves ...even on not-reconstructed railway tracks!
so it's a nice technic but may just too expensive for common use...(by the way: i think the chinese maglev is german transrapid technic)
and one final note: AFAIK in california there was at the beginning of the last century a widespread public transportation system based on trains etc. which was bought by the big car companies and just closed down...
Most of the travel time using a train is time you can use to read, work, sleep, and so on. Take a route like Copenhagen - Stockholm. It's about 4 hours door to door by jet and about 5 by train, but on the train that about a 4.5 hour block of work, some even have internet connections. On the plane, you're never in one spot for more than 30 or 40 minutes unless there's a delay.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Doesn't Disneyland already have one of these. I visited there a few years ago and can remember a strange train which took you to the parks...
There is not, never has been, and never will be any justification for this kind of folly, except maybe on a very small scale in amusement parks, where the environmental damage is minimal.
"I'd bet money that 9 out of 10 average Americans couldn't even guess at the cost of a train ride from New York to D.C."
They don't need to, you can go to http://www.amtrak.com and find out the exact fare.
Interestingly, Amtrak has the most sophisticated web site of *ANY* rail or train system in the world.
"The reason why is because most Americans first learn of passenger travel on a train when they see than Amtrack has derailed once again"
There is no "C" in Amtrak, and more importantly, Amtrak's safety record is excellent. You're confused with Contrail or CSX perhaps?
"and dozens of people are dead or in the hospital."
Yes, that's happened once to Amtrak.
You, apparently, don't know anything about Amtrak. Doesn't stop you from putting your foot in your mouth though.
Try the Acela train once, and you may change your mind about Amtrak.
No thread on maglev is complete without a reference to the fascinating Eric Laithwaite - see here for example. Note I'm not in any way endorsing this site - it's just a starting point. The jury is still out on whether he was a genius or a nutter, but I'd be interested to hear any comments about him...
" Amtrak is run by the government."
It most assuredly is not.
"and they're rather perpetuate the belief that trains just aren't profitable anymore than take the steps needed to succeed. "
Passenger train service is govt. subsidized in every country of the world.
Fact.
It's so nice driving under the MagLev track in Norfolk--but that's as useful as the MagLev is right now.
The primary cause stated on our local news was that the $14 million we had for the project paled in comparison to the billion dollars Japan spent on theirs.
Basically, we're trying to build a MagLev on the cheap. Apparently, it does run, it's just really shaky, and they can't figure out how to make it comfortable for transporting humans, and not just small furry animals.
Amtrak doesn't own most of those right of ways, the freight railway companies do. That's why you sit for hours (be glad you only sat 30 min - I sat for several hours multiple times on a Chicago to DC train) in the middle of no where. If Amtrak is off schedule, and the freight trains are not then you have a traffic jam on the rails.
That is Amtrak's biggest problem. If they had their own rails on most (all) their routes then they could control timetables, speed, etc. Wait a min, passenger rail used to have that - back in the 1950's before someone thought they could "consolidate" rail services because of the popularity of the automobile......
. there used to be a sig here.....
as an Alumnus of ODU (Computer Science) I have been interested in this project. It has really no practical reasons.. and it more of a research project. The track covers half the campus and was supposed to start years ago now.
Reasons I have heard for its demise is that Technical issues have cropped up. One of them is that the track itself is not "level" enough. The others are more in the range of mismanagement.
Frankly it looks like a nice series of archways throughout the campus, and yet.. I can see no reason to build a small one.
The articles in the Virginian Pilot on this(www.pilotonline.com) failure all seem to state that there will be no money until the Company really assures that they can pay it back. Something on the order of 7 million is already being considered lost or unrecoverable.
Me.. A simple bus would be easier to cost, and maintain and probably faster.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
> For starters, the train was at least 15 minutes late arriving at the station (in Kirkwood).
Only 15 minutes late! That must be a record! Of course, the train from Chicago *to* St. Louis is usually on-time (sometimes early).
> The downtown St. Louis Amtrak station is a disgrace. It looks like an old tin shack. Ever since our original station (Union Station) was decomissioned and turned into a shopping mall
LOL! It's so funny because it's true. I've made several trips from Chicago to St. Louis. Chicago's Union Station is a real train station and St. Louis has a hobo shack.
Why not move the St. Louis station back to the mall? Is this an Amtrak decision or a St. Louis decision?
> Then, our train stopped out in the middle of nowhere for at least 30 minutes, waiting for the track to clear up ahead.
That happens every time. Sometimes they explain they are waiting on freight train, switching crews, refueling, etc.
> felt like driving would have been the superior experience.
ROTFL! Typical St. Louisian! Probably suffering from separation anxiety from your car... There really should be a 12-step program or something.
Have you looked at the cost of living in those Northeastern high-density metropolises yet? Or the comparatively high renter-to-owner ratio of residents there, which creates a permanent lower class of renters vs. a permanent property owner upper class (at least among people who don't want to -- or can't -- leave those cities)? There's a reason people keep leaving the Northeast, and it ain't just the weather.
Home ownership drives much of the American economy, and the ease with which one can buy a home in this country is one of the drivers of economic upward mobility and socio-political equality. Trying to herd the entire population into small, transport-efficient pods would do far, far more damage, both economic and political, to this country than even an energy-cost spike.
Energy cost spikes and supply drops can be mitigated, both by development of new, more efficient technology (the car companies aren't working their asses off on hybrids just for kicks) and by the fact that new reserves become economically viable as the price of oil goes up. See Siberia -- there's unbelievable amounts of oil out there, it's just not economically feasible to build the necessary infrastructure to get to it right now. That'll change if the market demands it.
I'm for conservation on a personal scale -- I drive a VW Jetta TDI (averages 44 mpg), I live a mile and a half from my office, and during college I not only rode busses most of the time, I drove them too. But attempts at socio-political manipulation based on gloom-and-doom predictions piss me off.
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
What'd I say?
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
A metal guideway can provide the levitation without a complex linear motor along the entire length. Magnets on the train can be repelled by a conductive track (such as aluminum or copper).
Maglev has been studied for a while... Final Report on the National Maglev Initiative
Well folks, this is just another example of how Northern Virginian tax payers (since a good chunck of the money that floats the Commonwealth finds its way down to southern VA) are paying for a project that is overbudget. And ironically, Governor Warner wants to raise Northern Virginia's taxes to pay for more roads to deal with congestion, while Norfolk gets a MagLev train costing $14million over bugdet. Does that seem fair to you? Personally, this project, although cool, is a slap in the face to those tax payers and especially to Northern Virginia. Frankly, I think that the technology has to be tried and proven first, and then take the initative. Heck, if Norfolk gets a MagLev, then the Washington DC metro should be outfitted with one soon too! More people ride the Metro every day then Norfolk could ship on a MagLev in a Week!
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Actually modern reactors produce little waste.
And:
After reprocessing the liquid high-level waste can be calcined (heated strongly) to produce a dry powder which is incorporated into borosilicate (Pyrex) glass to immobilise the waste. The glass is then poured into stainless steel canisters, each holding 400 kg of glass. A year's waste from a 1000 MWe reactor is contained in 5 tonnes of such glass, or about 12 canisters 1.3 metres high and 0.4 metres in diameter. These can be readily transported and stored, with appropriate shielding.
You know how many tonnes of particulate matter a fossil fuel plant spew into the air? A 1000 MWe sprays so much particulate matter that there ismore tonnage of radioactive Carbon-13 in the waste from the Fossil plant than there is total waste from the Nuclear power plant.
One nice thing about nuclear power is that its a closed system by design.
People like you create FUD and lies to support the acidification and destruction of the natural world and to subsidize the OPEC dictatorships.
By the way, while you bitch about our proper disposal from power plants (salt mines) to Pentax, other countries like Russia just dump scuttled reactors in the ocean to this date.
No one uses trains in the US because our country is 1500 miles north to south, 3000 across and 4000 diagonally. Its both cheaper and faster to fly.
Funny. Miles and miles of US innovations have nothing to do with the DoD. You are having in ignorant fantasy about the US right now. In fact, why don't you stop using the Internet, that was DARPA, its militaristic and evil is it not?
The portrayal of the US as war mongering fools causes people to underestimate the US and then makes it even easier than it was to make money off those who have these arrogant misconceptions.
And most of the capital intensive businesses like lots of research, drugs, aerospace, do still happen in the US.
This prototype looks like crap compared to currently running trains in tokyo (360mph) and shanghai:
360 mph tokyo maglev
Shanghai shuttle
The 'Detroit People Mover' even makes this prototype look like a joke. American Maglev has nothing but a few patents and engineers, no assets or capital available to repay the huge loan, apparently. This reminds me of a certain Simpsons episode..
TallGreen CMS hosting
I'd really like build my house on Manhattan, or even NYC !
Japan does High Speed Trains. China is where they are building Maglev