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Chinese MagLev Train Opens Next Week
lupa1420 writes "The Guardian reports on the launch next week of the world's fastest train, 430kph, in China, which uses magnetic levitation technology. Includes instructions on how to make your own maglev demo at home."
I'm no expert on magnetic levitation, but won't the fields totally screw with any electronic device in or near the train? Laptop hard-drives, PDA-memory, IPod disk...
Or is there an obvious and easy way to shield that stuff?
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
Cunning population control device? You make the call!
monorail... Monorail... MONORAIL!
This'll really put Shanghai on the map.
PS : Thats the fricking Manchester Guardian. I know its published in London *now* but it is NOT (and I cannot overstate this) the London Guardian.
a maglev train?
:)
They are cool and all, but why aren't trains
fast enough to begin with?
I still want to hear choo-choo! chugga-chugga!
(Yes, I know that's backwards..)
Atleast I can build my own and my cat can get
around the house easier
So no more squishing coins on train tracks for them. Screw that new train, bring back the internation pastime!
"plans for a maglev line between Hamburg and Berlin were derailed by the Green Party. As part of Gerhard Schroder's ruling coalition, it argued that the proposed line would damage wildlife with electromagnetic radiation"
That's just... so rich... pure logic.
Alas, the maglev's official home page (I think; at least they sell tickets) is all Chinese and out of date to boot. In the meantime, the best place to go is Wangjianshuo's blog, in particular the well-illustrated Maglev in depth story.
Things that suck about the maglev:
- It only runs every half hour, which kind of defeats the point of having a superfast train.
- Tickets cost 75 RMB (~$9) a pop, this in a country where 800 RMB a month is considered a decent wage.
- It doesn't go into the city, you have to transfer to a subway and ride another 6 stops just to get on the Puxi side of the river.
Not that any of this will stop me from going for a ride next time I'm in Shanghai!Cheers,
-j.
http://www.penguinhosting.net/~jpeck/prime/ this site can replace it for the mean time.
Anyone made the demo yet? I'd love to do it, but I'm at work. Stupid work.
Post some pics if you get it working!
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
how feasible is a maglev system in the US? yeah, it's a pipe dream, but imagine...
Boston to NYC. LA to San Fran. maybe even a network of the major cities.
As it is now, it's cheaper and sometimes faster to take Greyhound than Amtrack! The US spent so much on railroad tracks and most aren't used anymore. Sure the costs would be expensive, but would it be worth it if some of those tracks were replaced to support maglevs?
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
... of the world's fastest train, 430kph...
French TGV does 515 km/h.
Iraq: war to save the U
Wouldn't such a system be better as a replacement for air travel? at speeds exceeding 400km/h, it is in the same ballpark as commercial passenger jets, while being much cheaper and more convenient to run. It almost seems a waste to use it for a half-hour trip.
Imaging a trans-continental one of these.
Note that this is European (in fact German) technology at work.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Probably the world's fastest train
China's superfast express launches next week. Sean Dodson reports on a revolution in public transport
Sean Dodson
Thursday January 15, 2004
The Guardian
On the southern bank of the Yangtze river, about 30km north of Shanghai, lies Pudong international airport. Since it opened its first terminal in 1999 it has served China's irrepressible 21st-century megalopolis with nothing more futuristic than a fleet of taxis and a schedule of buses.
If you are lucky, and the roads are clear, you can be in the city centre in 40 minutes. But as of next week, to coincide with the Chinese New Year, passengers arriving at Pudong will be able to reach the centre of town in a fraction of the time.
The world's first commercial high-speed maglev now connects Pudong with downtown Shanghai in a very, very nimble seven minutes 20 seconds. Shanghai's new express can reach a top speed of 430kph (267mph) in just under two minutes.
Maglev - shorthand for magnetic levitation - is basically a train that floats on an electromagnetic cushion, which is propelled along a guideway at incredible speeds. Magnetic levitation has been a long-standing dream of railway engineers - the first patent was issued in 1934 - but the first new mass transit system since the advent of the aeroplane has suffered more delays than the average London commuter train.
Little wonder. At first glance, maglev technology appears extortionately expensive when compared with conventional rail: a mile of track costs at least 3.5m to build and that's not including the cost of the giant electricity substations. But, say its advocates, the long-term benefits are many. Not only can it cut journey times in half, maglev is cleaner and cheaper to run than passenger aircraft. According to Transrapid, the German manufacturer of the Shanghai maglev, the technology uses five times less energy - per passenger mile - than jet aircraft. Maglev trains cost a few million pounds per vehicle, compared with $200m for the average Boeing 747.
Moreover, maglev schedules should also be less affected by bad weather or congestion than air travel and are cheaper to maintain. As the maglev has no wheels there is far less erosion of track, radically cutting operating costs. "Maglev offers the prospect of first-class style for a lower cost than economy air travel," explains Robert Budell of Transrapid, "there will be less need to pack you in like sardines".
But for a maglev fast enough to compete seriously with passenger aircraft you must travel to Japan. In the foothills of Mount Fuji, 100km west of Tokyo, lies the tourist town of Tsuru. Why would anyone build a test track for the future of mass transit in such mountainous terrain? "Because Japan is a mountainous country," answers Tadao Okai, a senior engineer for Japan Rail. "The vast majority of 18.4km of our test track is underground because when we come to build the maglev network we must build it beneath our cities."
At Tsuru there is a small observation deck and visitor centre that overlooks the single kilometre where the maglev emerges from its tunnel. In December, the Japanese maglev reached 581kph, breaking its own Guinness World Record of 552kph (with passengers aboard) set in 1999. However, most analysts believe that Japan's proposed inter-city maglev could be decades away from being built. Even in China, maglev has suffered setbacks. Plans for a 1,290km Shanghai-to-Beijing line are officially on hold. While in Transrapid's back yard, plans for a maglev line between Hamburg and Berlin were derailed by the Green Party. As part of Gerhard Schroder's ruling coalition, it argued that the proposed line would damage wildlife with electromagnetic radiation, and that its concrete track-supports would spoil forests.
Part of the problem is that both Japan and Germany already have enviable high-speed rail networks. Japan's pioneering shinkansen - or bullet train - carries 300,000 people every day from Tokyo to Osaka in two hours 30 minutes a
no text
... Bush to announce that he will increase Amtrak's budget by 5% each year in order to get a working american Maglev by 2030?
You don't have to go so far. Just ask how many people are detained in the US (or by the US in Guantanamo or similiar places) without rights and without accusation.
And just recently, the Supreme Court said, that's okay. New York Times article
Before everybody shouts that I can't compare the two countries and that I would be put in jail just for saying that... I admit: you're right.
The USA is a free country. Still. Quite. Well, relatively. As long as you're not Arabian or muslim or otherwise suspicious.
But of course, none of us is, so we don't have to worry. Do we?
I don't need a signature.
The Chinese are not ALLOWED to have fast trains! There are poor people there! And they are COMMIES!!!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=89257&cid=7719 262
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Last week we were driving along the motorway beside the maglev track in PuDong. Someone said there was a train coming. We all turned to look, and had just a quick glimpse before it was gone. That thing really moves :-)
I don't know how many passengers it holds, but from the brief glimpse I got, it didn't look very big.
Actually that's unlikely since it's only the stray field that would affect your equipment, and that will fall off as d^3 - magnetic field strength follows an inverse-cube rule IIRC. Note also that RF shielding != mag shielding; its *very* difficult (if not impossible) to shield from magnetic fields effectively because the coupling is inductive, rather that capacitative as with RF interference.
Though it sounds nice, it turns out these trains are way more expensive then the normal trains on wheels. Pain is that at higher velocities, 250+ the magnetic field creates its own drag. Now great... that means you have to inject more energy to overcome that. Furthermore, though wheels cause drag, at high velocities it turns out the drag from friction with the air is the main problem. So a lower cw-value will help you out alot more.
All in all it is not a solution, since it costs more to build and to operate. That is why German parliament voted against a German invention and Dutch parliament is also not to keen on it.
Use Adsense for Charity
For the physics-minded amongst us, or at least those who haven't already gone reaching for their calculators, that's just about 1 m/s^2 acceleration, or around 1/10 gee. (If you want to get technical, you could add the vector of holding it up against gravity, and get about 9.86 m/s^2 total acceleration, or about 1.005 gee. Guess we know where all the real work is going into on this one!)
P.S. And just why can't we use ² type character coding on /., anyway?
ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
Didnt they annouce they'd also be heading to the moon and mars in the decently near future? is it me, or are the Chinese kinda trying to one-up the west.
Lord, I hope this is't the next Great Leap Forward.
Coffee is the most appealing compromise between water and tar.
A few years back they did an analysis of the costs versus benefits of various high speed options. I recall that the MagLev's were way too expensive for the speed you got. As I remember, best results were somewhere in the 180mph range with European style trainsets.
Both have state murder policies.
Both want to go back to the moon.
One has businesses wanting to setup there (china), the other doesnt (USA). One is actually progressing technology that is useful (transport) one is blowing money on fictional wars and destruction (USA).
It's km/h, not kph.
If you're going to use units you're not familiar with, maybe you ought to have a look at how to use them properly first.
/. Where the truth
Does anyone know the strength of the Magnetic Fields used to lift the train?
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Smart bank cards, GSM in Europe beats US crdit/debit cards and cell phone standards. Now commercial high-speed maglev train.
Why is that? Is there anything wrong with US that it doesn't let the country to lead hi-techs anymore?
Less is more !
Boston to NYC: 211 miles / 50 minutes
Boston to Washington, DC: 465 miles / 1.75 hours
Boston to Orlando, FL: 1,320 miles / 5 hours
Los Angeles to San Francisco: 387 miles / 1.5 hours
NYC to Washington, DC: 258 miles / 1 hour
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
This thing looks amazing, but I think it was only built for rich businessmen wanting to feel important as they zip from their luxury hotel suite in Pudong to the airport.
I had friends over for Christmas in Shanghai, and we all planed to ride the maglev when they left. Thing is, the cost is not only prohibitive for locals - it's also ridiculous to charge 75 RMB per person, when you consider a taxi ride from Puxi is approximately 180 RMB. Cram 4 people in a taxi, and you get there for half the price. (And considering how the taxis drive in SH, thrice the excitement!)
I also heard you can get 'luxury' tickets for 150 RMB/person. Why you wouldn't endure an 'economy' ticket considering the ride takes 20 minutes and is bumpless, is, well, not entirely beyond me considering how people will pay for such useless nonsense.
In the end, we took a cab to the airport, and as the driver was driving down the highway at 120 km/h, we saw the maglev zip by us as if we were immobile. It looked like something out of Star Trek... Damn impressive... from the outside.
I doubt that maglev would be cheaper, safer, or more convenient for everyone.
Although maglev means no power losses from the wheels, drag from sea-level air will be much worse than the drag experienced by a plane at 35,000 feet. Add the power required to create levitation and deal with eddy current dissapation and I doubt that maglev trains are all that energy efficient . Add to that the inefficiencies of getting power to the train and you have a not so efficient mode of transportation.
Construction costs are also an issue. Although airports are expensive infrastructure, they are probably less expensive than maglev trains. Planes leverage the existence of air - you don't need to lay track on every mile of every route in the air.
Although maglevs can't fall out of the sky, like a plane can, I suspect that a maglev crash would be just as fatal (derailing at several hundred km/hr would not be pleasant). Moreover, maglev is in its infancy -- it took air travel decades to learn how to operate at extremely low levels of fatalities/bazillion passenger miles. Although the French have a remarkable safety record with the TGV, the British experience with even ordinary rail is not too comforting.
I doubt that maglevs would be able to come into the city in many places (most current cities are too dense). Thus, one is faced with the same "getting to the airport/remote train station" problems. I also suspect that these trains might also need extra security. Maglevs would seem to be a nice terrorist target -- hitting either the track or planting a suicide bomber onboard. Thus, we can expect some of the same queues and delays at a maglev station as at an airport.
The reliability of the maglev track is also a concern. The track is a significant single-point of failure mode. While aircraft can fly around a storm (being only limited by the conditions at the takeoff and destination airports), maglev would be subject to the vagaries of weather and damage along the entirety of its route.
Maybe maglev can work, but the advantages of it are not as obvious as proponents would have us believe.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The TGV is still the worlds fastest commercial train. Whilst it normally cruises around 300km/h, it has travelled at 515.3km/h on a REAL piece of track (i.e. not a test track). That top speed was set in 1990.
What about Inductrak systems? They have much lower maintenance costs, and do not require magnetic shielding. See http://www.llnl.gov/str/Post.html , and http://www.matchrockets.com/ether/halbach.html for halbach arrays.
Still Rampant, Wowbagger
430kph
Couldn't you use the right standards ?
430 km/h.
Or 192.47594 assyrian cubits per blink.
(http://www.chemie.de/tools/units.php3 is your friend)
- There are many advantages for Transrapid tracks:
- Steep slopes: Transrapid trains can easily climb 6 to 10 percent slopes (6-10ft height difference on 100ft), because the magnets are strong enough to pull the train up and there is no limit posed by the rail-wheel contact.
- Small curves: The Transrapid train can travel in curves with 2km (1,3mls) radius at 200 kph (130mph), in curves with 2,5km (1,6mls) with 250 kph (160mph), because the track can be slanted up to 12 degrees. Normal rail tracks can't use those slants, because you have always to consider the possibility, that a train may have to stop there.
- The track doesn't need much space of the landscape, because it runs mostly on pylons. You have to found those pylons every 100-200m (300-600ft), but you don't cut the landscape in half as with traditional tracks. People and animals can roam freely around the track.
- With the above cited properties you can build Transrapid tracks in densely settled environments like cities and thus build the train stations in the town centers. So you don't need to provide extra means to get to the stations, quite different than with airports, which consume much space and thus need to be built outside the towns.
With all those advantages: Why don't we have plenty of Transrapid tracks? There are two principal answers:- Maglev trains like the Transrapid are VERY expensive to build. Basicly the whole track is a continious bridge, this makes the construction not even cheap. Switches between tracks are even more complicated, Transrapid for instance uses a 250m long steel frame which can be bended over the full length to provide smooth connections from one track to the next.
- Maglev trains are yet another infrastructure completely independend from the existing infrastructures for roads, tracks, rivers, channels and airports. You can't use anything already existing, you have to start completely anew. That means even for a single relation you have to put a complete chain of constructions in place, starting from power substations and tracks to maintenance buildings and passenger access. This makes the initial investions high without guaranteering an early return on investment. It also means that in the beginning without a complete net of relations the passengers have to use at least one other transport system for their travel, thus making it necessary to connect to the existing transportation infrastructure.
Maglev trains fill a very small ecological niche fitting inbetween conventional trains and airplanes. To get a sufficient amount of revenue you have to look at potential relations that are insufficiently served by current systems, where the conventional systems can't simply be expanded. The Pudong-Shanghai relation was such an example: The busses and cabs are at their capacity limit due to traffic jams, a conventional train was not available for the whole distance, and it was not easy to connect the old train tracks to the town center.Maglev trains may be also an option for emerging economies, which don't have yet a complete traffic system in place, especially if airports and rail tracks are missing. Here you could put a system in place that serves both: commuter traffic and long distance travel. It would be more expensive than conventional trains. But it will be much cheaper than trains+airports, and sooner or later you will need both of them.
...does it run GNU/Linux?
Cool- that beats the crap out of typing in "430 kph in mph" at Google!
Your search - 430 kph in assyrian cubits per blink - did not match any documents.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Definition please:
The "make your own" says you need "Perspex". Would some kind Brit care to define that for those of us on the other side of the pond?
"Maglev offers the prospect of first-class style for a lower cost than economy air travel," explains Robert Budell of Transrapid, "there will be less need to pack you in like sardines".
Yeah, that's what's going to happen. I guess he did say *prospect*.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the government's press conference:
Hu Jintao: Now I'm here to answer any questions you may have about the maglev train.
Reporter: Can it outrun the flash?
Hu Jintao: You bet.
Reporter: Can superman outrun the flash?
Hu Jintao: Eh, sure, why not.
there's also no way you could fly it in a building to destroy said building
Maglev can't crash into anything except the train station or another train. Perhaps remote control would work, assuming that terrorists could never take over or hack into the control center......
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You go, repressive homicidal regime !
Sometime in the 1960s Americans lost their enthusiasm for science and futuristic things. But the Chinese retain their enthusiasm and are doing things like going into space, building th world's tallest building, and superfast trains. If you wander around Chinese streets or schools you'll see this enthusiasm in posters and books etc.
Americans got jaded by the liberal pablum of 'Silent Spring' and 'Limits to Growth' in the 1960s. Science became pollutors, war mongers, and could do no right. Though pockets of "true believers" remain in groups like Slashdot, it is sad to live in such an apathetic country.
This is offtopic but hey, Ill take the bait.
Reminds me of a poem:
"First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me."
Pastor Martin Niemoller
Last time I checked Imperial College was in London not Manchester.
Wouldn't it be cool to take a 300MPH train from New York to LA?
Smart bank cards, GSM in Europe beats US crdit/debit cards and cell phone standards. Now commercial high-speed maglev train.
Why is that? Is there anything wrong with US that it doesn't let the country to lead hi-techs anymore?
The psychological need that you feel to post that comment says otherwise ... nobody bothers dissing somebody who is "way behind" in any meaningful sense.
Who said it was magic?
One advantage of moving to an electric lawn mower, or car, is that it's considerably easier to improve pollution controls, and to gain efficiency, at a power plant than it is to, say, set up emissions tests and required repairs for many millions of individual cars. Think of all the grossly inefficient two-cycle lawn mowers out there -- spewing white smoke, flooded. Would you rather take on the task of repairing all those so they burn cleaner and more efficiently, or would you rather move to some sort of electric mower and be able to address pollution and energy inefficiency at the source? Setting aside what we do with the spent batteries, the electric is a decent option. It doesn't just "move the problem somewhere else," it moves it somewhere where you can address it head-on.
The idea is to separate production of the energy from distribution of it, so that you can get the best value during production. That would also be a huge advantage of a hydrogen fuel cell model: yes, liquid hydrogen costs energy to produce, but you can do that at the power plant. Let's say someone develops a better way to control emissions made during production: you get that advantage right away, rather than needing to turn over a generation of cars before you see that incremental change in efficiency or pollution control.
That's for consumer goods, anyway. The argument's different in scale or degree, I guess, for trains, but it's similar: would you rather replace or refurb fabulously expensive train engines when some new pollution-busting technology comes online, or would you rather apply it at the power plant and have everyone benefit right away?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The average train speed 80 years ago using steam locomotives was faster than what we have today using Diesel and electrics in the UK. In fact, the Mallard regularly did London to Edinburgh at 126mph. We can only dream of speeds like that these days. Today the track determines the top speed and what we have now is apparently crap.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
China does it again, space exploration or fastest train. All the best China!
Just make sure not to bring any credit cards when you're on board.. Also, don't wear anything metallic if you dont want to be stuck to the floor all day. =)
But realisticly, how do they avoid this problem?
I know that in days of yore, MENSA used to support Nazi-style politics and "science", but are you some kind of white supremacist?
Mensa (latin: table) is the German word for the university mess hall.
The "Rice Rocket".
*ducks*
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
Keep this in mind, the TGV and other high speed networks have impeccable safety records because they were built over anything in it's way. They typically use overpasses rather than underpasses (i.e. nothing falling onto tracks from above) and never have grade crossings. Grade crossings are where many accidents happen when a train hits a car on the track. I bet many accidents in the UK are not caused by the tracks, but things on the tracks, that however is just pure conjecture on my part.
A Google search shows that the patents were awarded in October last year, but I couldn't find much recent activity. Most of the work seems to date to 2000.
From the article: ...plans for a maglev line between Hamburg and Berlin were derailed by the Green Party. As part of Gerhard Schroder's ruling coalition, it argued that the proposed line would damage wildlife with electromagnetic radiation...
Oh no, the big scary magnets will hurt the poor little squirrels!
Seriously, are these people completely dumb? Those two sentences just made my stomach churn. Maybe they didn't realize that light is also 'electromagnetic radiation'... though calling it radiation automatically associates it with nuclear radiation which, of course, is evil.
But wait... aren't magnets supposed to help speed healing? Maybe they're condemning the animals to their own deaths!
God.
While the TGV managed to go 515 km/h, that was done on a four-car trainset on an extremely straight stretch of track with specially-modified overhead catenary pickup units.
Because today's very fast trains still rely on steel rail and overhead wiring, you will soon run into issues of increased physical wear and tear on both the track and the rolling stock at speeds above 300 km/h (186 mph). I don't see steel-rail trains going much faster than 350 km/h because of this limitation.
Because maglevs don't have physical contact with the guide track, this allows for far higher speeds than steel-rail trains on a regular basis. Speeds exeecding 500 km/h (310 mph) are well with the possibility of maglev trains, especially with careful aerodynamic design of the trainset itself.
Once you stop your evil, criminal, known cocaine addict President murdering people, then you might not be lumped in so closely. The sooner he's dead and buried in an unmarked grave the better.
The Russians say they can get to Mars by 2014. They also have a suborbital space plane in the works. I think the Russians actually like being underestimated, in fact I wouldn't be suprised if it's an intentional part of their strategy.
They bought it from the Aryans. I mean the Germans.
Ok, I built it all as directed but this thing doesn't go anywhere near 430km/h.
lol... what will the trolls do next?
;)
I'm torn... Do I support freedom of speech (yes, even when private businesses are involved)? Or do I take pleasure in knowing that one of the worst websites on the planet is no more?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
j/k
> Maybe they didn't realize that light is also 'electromagnetic radiation'..
And a laser beam is just light.
Are those people putting warning stickers on laser equippement also completely dumb in your eyes?
Same with x-rays and higher-energy radiation.
but we're talking about electromagnetic fields here, not a superconcentrated barrage of particles.
Do power lines cause cancer?
Not quite true. During a special run downhill, Mallard's speed peaked at 126mph for a few seconds. Still not bad for a steam train though. UK trains still did respectably (6th) in the world rankings a couple of years ago.
a decent service then
Oh yeah, Connex was such a great success. No doubt that's why they had their franchise stripped from them early!
Connex trains, Universal Studios and Canal+ were all owned by Vivendi (the Paris sewerage company).
I built this for a science project years ago....
The magnet stripes you can buy are alternating polarized NSNSNSNSNS to increase their lifespan. So you have to use special (not monopole - he he) magnets made for this purpose. Long thin ones polarised N on one thin side and south on the other.
You can get them - but you have to search for them
At first I was afraid it was some new form of Marmite.
carries 300,000 people every day from Tokyo to Osaka in two hours 30 minutes and uses far less electricity than the proposed maglev. The maglev link could cut the journey time to one hour but the enormous cost of building a new network is more than the country can afford.
If it cuts travel time from 2.5 hours to 1 hour and 300,000 trips per day are taken then you save something like 450,000 wasted man-hours a day. If those people make, say, $10 an hour you are "saving" (time is money, afterall) something like $4,500,000 every day. Thats $1,642,500,000 every year. Over ten years thats something like $16 billion. People would probably pay an extra $15 for a ticket that got them there in 1 hour instead of 2.5. Done right, something like this could almost be commercialy viable, even without too much government help. Also, with a much shorter travel time it is very likely that more people would use the train. Just a few thoughts.
--Greg
Build more!
:)
China has lots of people, needs more bandwidth.
Trains are great in cities where they will run frequently. Over long haul routes, trains consume vast quantities of land (and present a problem when they intersect roads and rivers and bisect fams.) Yet the land is in use just a short portion of every hour.
We like high speed train proposals because of the downtown to downtime time. But this can be done with planes. Just send the high speed train to the airport, and do the pre-flight prep (security, check-in) on the train. Thus resulting in effectively zero transfer time. Then no way the long haul train can beat the plane, downtown to downtown.
Of course airports take land too, and planes need to be made less polluting, but this is where the effort should go.
More info on these ideas is on this blog.
it has been reported that the chinese government decided against using the Transrapid technology for building a new connection from Shanghai to Beijing. :-))
The situation is not really clear right now, according to this message, the german companies involved in the current project claim that these reports were due to a false report in a chinese newspaper and they still are look forward to follow-up projects.
(Sorry, link is in german only. Have fun with babelfish
Must be mightily efficient with no wind resistance.....
My understanding was that Transrapid got a portion of it's lift from aerodynamics. It runs on rollers until it gets up to speed.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Do power lines cause cancer?
There's a lot of debate about that. I've yet to be convinced either way, but they seem unlikely to be a major factor from what I can see. However, there are some very suspect looking clusters...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I don't think anyone who actually knows what they're talking about seriously believes that power lines cause cancer. The mechanism just isn't there.
But my point is... it's a meaningless beauty contest to seek to reduce electromagnetic emissions like this, especially for wildlife.
But you can shield those magnetic fields by use of a 'more efficient than plain old air' 'magnetic circuit' for want of a better technical word.
Get a bar magnet and put a tightly fitting metallic tube around the bar magnet that allows the poles to point towards each open end of the cylinder/metallic tube. If the magnet is entirely inside the tube no field protrudes. If one end pokes proud of either end the field has to flow around the long way to the other end (exposing it to the atmosphere).
High frequency oscillating magnet fields create and interact with electric fields when they collapse. Your car ignition coil wouldn't work otherwise!
How tro make a maglev at home
1 Take a roll of double-backed sticky tape, a piece of cardboard, 20 to 30 small magnets (square ones work best) and ideally one sheet of Perspex.
2 Cut two strips of the tape no more than 1m long. Take 20 magnets (setting aside five for later use) and stick them to the tape. Try to space them as equally as you can, all facing the same polarity. To check this, run a spare magnet over each row. It should either be attracted or repelled by all the magnets in the strip. Now tape the magnets to the cardboard base of the box in parallel lines close to the sides of edge of the base. This is the guideway.
3 To prevent the maglev from leaving the guideway, build two walls. Cardboard will do, but Perpex is best because the point of this experiment is to see magnetic levitation in action. You should now have a makeshift open-top box with the Perspex constituting the longest sides.
4 Now you need a train. Cut a rectangular piece of cardboard that fits inside the guide walls. Attach four magnets to the corners of the train. Be sure that all four magnets are placed so that they are repelled by the magnets on the track. Place the train gently above the track inside the guide walls and watch it float. Hey presto! Magnetic levitation.
5 A gentle push will move the train along the track, but if you want to be really posh, use another magnet. With the lack of friction and wind resistance the maglev should float to the other end.
Does that mean only Wizards can use it?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
6. ???
7. Prophet!
Metatrolls united for Allah and Walken!
Peace be upon TEH SPOKE!!!1!!11!
I've been fascinated with Maglev technology since I was a kid, though I admit I haven't followed it closely lately - I didn't know a functioning passenger transrapid had been built in China.
Anyway, I have long been extremely annoyed that Transrapid's maglev technology has been the one to catch on the fastest, because as I see it, it has some major drawbacks relative to other maglev designs.
The primary problem is that the transrapid system uses magnetic levitation in attraction mode -- meaning you're not floating mutually repelling magnets, you're wrapping a part of the train under the track and using magnetic attraction to pull it upward.
There are some huge basic problems with this strategy. To start with, magnetic attraction is dynamically unstable - the closer you get, the harder it pulls, until you stick to the track. Transrapid deals with this by detecting the gap and constantly adjusting the current to the electromagnets with a fast computer. Magnetic repulsion, on the other hand, is dynamically stable: float a magnet over the other one and it will simply sit there, so fast computer needed. The Japanese design functions this way: the train sits in a U-shaped track, repelled on three sides.
There are some other serious advantages of repulsion-mode maglev:
The major downside of the repulsion design is that it requires superconducting electromagnets on the train, and they're very expensive (for now) and can cause interference problems if not properly shielded, as someone noted above. But I see that as a technological problem that will be solved eventually and it would be better to work on that now than to saddle ourselves with a standard that has the fundamental problems of attraction-mode maglev design. Sixty years down the road when superconducting magnets are cheap, we might really regret that.
There's another minor downside to repulsion maglev as well- it only levitates when the train is going fast enough to induce currents in the track, so the train has to settle onto wheels as it rolls into the station. (or have supplementary electromagnets in the station).
Both the Japanese and transrapid designs have one other problem: the tracks have to pre-define the angle of the train as it rounds corners (the japanese track is a square "u"). You determine the speed beforehand and angle the track so that the force vector on the passengers is "down" with respect to their butts. This means you can't change the speed of the train later without making it ride like a roller coaster, so no faster trains down the line, and no adjusting speed for current conditions. And it means you have to manufacture very carefully-designed track segments at precise and constantly-changing curvatures. You either have standard track segments and limit the curves you can build, or build a lot of custom track segments. This gets expensive.
IIRC, there was a design done by a team in the US two decades or so ago that used a curved U-shaped track in repulsion mode that had the benefits of the japanese de
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
...trains may seem wonderful. However, with the amounts of investment required, you're pretty much stuck with the original route for the next 100 years or so. Planes, trucks, and cars, OTOH, can be re-routed as needed, like packets on the internet.
...it goes from where no one lives to where no one works.
how feasible is a maglev system in the US? yeah, it's a pipe dream, but imagine...
Boston to NYC. LA to San Fran. maybe even a network of the major cities.
It's not maglev, but high speed rail from LA to San Francisco is in the works. CA has already passed a $9B bond issue to pay for it. It will go through Fresno, and supposedly from LA to SF in under 3 hours.
It will sure beat the hell out of an 8 hour drive, or paying $450 for a short-notice purchase of an airline ticket!
the cause for all the pages the other guys find being out of date is that searching for a chinese company building the maglev won't get you anywhere. It's a german company who invented and built it. the page is at www.transrapid.de
Meanwhile, we're sitting in traffic and complaints why we're spending a few more billions more for NASA
Ever used the Eurostar from London through the tunnel to Paris or Bruxelles? Noticed that it goes very slowly in the UK and speeds up like hell once it reaches "the continent"? Since it is the same train for the whole journey, it can only be the tracks.
(This might have changed recently, they were talking about new tracks, I certainly hope so. It was a pain to use it 5 years ago.)
I also hear nobody else seriously contemplates voting machines, they all still use that old, primitive, slightly-more-reliable paper-ballot system.
Yes, and most of the world's advanced democracies use fair voting systems where a majority of voters decide who will elect them - rather than the US's 19th century UK-derived broken system of plurality voting where a minority of voters dominate the representation and an adversarial, bipolar political system is systematically reproduced.
Seriously, all this fuss over changing the mechanics of the physical voting process when the electoral system itself is decrepit strikes me as fiddling while Rome burns.
Da Blog
This is very exciting and hopefully will help along the process of getting the Los Angeles-Palmdale Maglev off the ground. (more info here http://la-palmdale.calmaglev.org/default.php?page= 2 )
Personally, I think an LA-Las Vegas train would be much more useful but I guess it could be extended out fi the LA-PLMD proves successful.
Skylab? Space Shuttle? Voyager? Hubble? The Internet? Pathfinder?
And thats just the major stuff American has done in space exploration.
While I share your enthusiasm for SUVs, I'm pretty sure that Pathfinder's a Japanese car.
I think we get better, but non-party oriented representation than if we used some kind of parliamentary system.
How on earth could you categorise US political representation as "non-party oriented" when there are basically just two political parties that evenly divide less than 50% of the eligible voters between themselves?
When I think of US elections, I picture enormous piles of several million votes. The first stage of counting the votes is to burn the 70% of the total pile of votes that are not for a candidate affiliated with one of the two parties that enjoys a slight lead in a particular region.
The US system produces artifical majorities of representation by minority parties. It's nothing to do with the presence or absence of a "parliamentary" system - unicameral, bicameral or even tricameral.
The central UK government, for example, uses US-style plurality voting but has a bicameral parliamentary system. However, the regional governments in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales use PR-based voting systems. So you can have one, both, or neither.
Da Blog
Kinda falls into the same category as plastering the country with wind-generators, literally pumping billions of taxmoney in there only to then decide that too many ruin the country-side view and stop (hail ecology). The same people who decide to phase out nuclear energy (bc. it's oh so dangerous and what not) only to then sell the production plants to China (hurray for credibility). The same people who again pump billions in subsidies into super expensive local coal only to buy the cheap nuclear energy from France. Ah, did I mention the 5-fold public trash bins (paper, bio-degradable, rest, glas, "green point"), only to feed the first three TOGETHER to burn it?
At least I think they're idealistic, in a kind of very naive way... As you can see, they're not my favorites... :-)
Last week they said it couldn't be done, this week it's been done. Go, US!
Oops, it was done outside the US where the "cannot be done" law does not apply.
Moderate the article into oblivion!
Oops, only comments can be moderated.
Have you looked at the GOP lately? Seriously though, the kind of over-arching tent approach to politics you mention is perhaps why the US is now split 50/50 in terms of political affiliation, whereas control of the executive and legislature oscillates wildly depending on the swing of 5-10% of voters "in the middle" This leaves the system open to abuse by lobbyists and special interests.
It's just that what would be minority parties aren't represented
I think both parties are minority parties. If you had a representative system, you'd see both the Dem and the GOP with around 30% each, and the remaining 40% split between several other parties. If the current system -- with both parties monopolizing all the available representation -- isn't a clearest case of unfair domination by political parties then I don't know what is.
What I would prefer is a system of either instant runoffs, or allowing people to vote for however many candidates they wish.
Then maybe you should look at the Irish system of Choice Voting. You can vote for as few candidates or as many as you wish. If you vote for only a single candidate, then your vote functions as a single plurality-style vote. If you vote for more than one candidate (using a ranking system), then your vote "transfers" accordingly as the weaker candidates are eliminated.
Da Blog
What would we do with a functional national transportation system? Bah. Raise the standard of living? Bah. Reduce pollution? Bah. Reduce our reliance on oil? Bah. How boring.
No, we need to squander as many billions as possible on a moon base, and getting two humanoid freaks to the surface of Mars.
If you missed the sarcasm, try again.
FYI, we have the technology to get to Mars. There will be no boon in new technology, of any kind, because of it. Unlike the Moon, Mars is only an issue of time and energy (read TAX MONEY - extracted from all and spent on the favored). Dream value? Sure - but I'd rather spend that kind of money to make a better life for all, right here. Sure we needed to invent the likes of calculators and lexan to get to the Moon, so we did, and now we've got them.
Compare.
China invests in their future. For China, getting to the moon means the creation of a substantial scientific community. (Like the one the US already has.)
US plays one-up and "invests" to line the wallets of the select, and leave the rest of us paying for "the dream".
Tune in a decade, or two, from now and see the difference.
Work is calculated as force * distance
where force and distance are vectors.
So with magnetic repulsion, no (or little) work is being done to _hold up_ the train.
Work is done to accelerate, decelerate, and overcome air friction to maintain speed.
Actually its more a German train on Chinese concrete. Of course everyone expects that in a few years the Chinese will have learned enough to build everything on their own. And sell all the components half price for the connection from Munich city to airport which will be under planning for years to come.
Let people vote for whomever and how many candidates as they want. Ranking is unnecessary.
I am unclear on how your proposed system works. If I can "vote" as many times as I want, for as many candidates as I want, then how do you decide who wins?
Vote Early, Vote Often? What you really want in an ideal voting system is a way to maximise concordance and transitivity. In the US, with blatant gerrymandering, these two aims are absolutely frustrated.
Da Blog
In regards to gerrymandering, it's effect on US elections is very overrated.
I think you're wrong. It promotes incumbency and false majorities. Overrated? Here's a quick'n'dirty guide to gerrymandering.
My personal favourite case of gerrymandering?
Da Blog
So in the presidential election you can vote for Gore and Nader and Buchanan if you want (Gore would probably still win since he has the most visibility).
As an aside, here's a blow-by-blow of how Ireland's last two Presidential elections worked. Single office, multiple candidates. Choice voting, instant runoff mechanism.
Take a look at the 1990 race - your assumption about Gore winning is not necessarily true because it would have depended on the ratio of Nader votes re-distributed between Bush and Gore. And transfers have a way of surprising you. But that's politics.
Da Blog
The only other good route would be S.D. to LA to S.F...
There is a plan to build a high speed train between SF and LA.
Senate Bill 1856: This bill authorizes a $9.95 billion general obligation bond for the November 2004 ballot. $9 billion would create the State's share of the construction costs for the San Francisco to Los Angeles segment of the high-speed train system as presented in the Authority's business plan. The remaining $950 million would be dedicated to feeder rail programs to the high-speed rail system. More here.
My Fiancee and I rode the MagLev Jan 3, 2004 from our Executive Suite at the St. Regis Shanghai to the Airport (confirming one opinion I read here on whom would be using it.)
We paid $55 RMB each for an 8 minute ride that no taxi, including a SH taxi was going to come even close to matching in speed or comfort.
Yes, at 430Kph it is wobbly but not any more wobbly than the new HKG airport train at it's top speed. And considering the difference in top speeds I'm highly impressed with the stability of the SH train.
As with the HKG train, baggage space is a joke. Whom ever designed both these train systems clearly didn't think about the fact that they were going to and from airports (or Chinese air travelers must travel with just the clothes on their backs.)
The HKG train though kicks the SH trains butt when it comes to the stations. HKG has staff with carts ready for your bags, and elevators to move you and your bags quickly and efficiently up and down.
With the SH system they totally forgot about baggage. You get to the elevated train via two sets of back to back escalators and there was no elevator in sight. I'm guessing that since there was no elevator that explains the lack of friendly staff with a cart to put your baggage on.
One interesting thing about the train though? Your bags have to be screened before you can take them up the escalators. They don't run you through an arch, but your bags go through a machine resembling a conventional airport X-ray screening device (you then still had to clear full airport security once you reached the airport.) I don't know what that was about.
The train had many staffers on it. Each cabin has its own female attendent and they have 3 male "porters" running up and down the train during it's 8 minute trip. I have no idea of the function of these people other than to look pretty as that's basically all they did the entire time (they certainly didn't help with baggage.)
If you are day tripping into SH for business with just your laptop in a briefcase this train is wonderful! The station is a 5 minute taxi ride into the heart of SH's financial and VC sector. It gives you back a solid 1.5 hours of time for meetings/lunch (figuring 45 minutes each way saved off a taxi ride).
If you are traveling with large bags it's platform design is a major pain in the butt.
But once you are in your seat and zipping down the track it is quite definitely one of those "I'm living the good life" moments as you watch all those taxi cabs making the run to the airport fall away behind you as if they are running full speed in reverse.
As a symbol of China's technological prowess (German assistance hidden carefully away) it is quite powerful and compelling.
As a symbol of China's need to make more progress in the ergonomics of baggage handling, it is equally powerful and compelling. :-)
All in all though, my Fiancee and I both thought we got our $110RMB's worth out of it as we got to spend an extra hour in Shanghai than we otherwise could have spent.
Scotty
I do recognize what you are proposing - it's a version of proportional representation with fixed proportions. A weird kind of accelerated plurality in fact, where parties will have even more control because they will field multiple candidates.
If you use single-candidate districts you will still have vote wastage for unelected candidates. If you use multi-candidate districts you will have less under vote wastage but you will now have over-vote wastage.
Da Blog
Surely for energy efficiency reasons the magnets will only be on when the train is there anyway?
testing out my trending skills