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China Abandons Long-Distance Maglev Effort
Ralph Lee writes "China has chosen to abandon its Maglev train effort from Beijing-Shanghai, according to this AP story: 'Besides cost, "the maglev technique was excluded because it does not match the wheel-track technique used by railways in China," the report said, citing Wang Derong, vice-chairman of the China Transport Association.... The scrapping of the 9-year-old maglev project - two weeks after the country's first maglev, a short stretch in Shanghai, began regular operation - represents a setback for the development of the technology in China, which many had seen as one of its key markets.'" The short 18-mile MagLev run mentioned earlier remains in operation, but China is not going to use magnetic levitation for the planned 750-mile Beijing-Shanghai link.
maglev is cheaper to run and maintain in the long run, but given that rail technology (existing rail technology) is cheap, prevalent, easy on industry, and doesn't require as much beaureaucratic rubbish and nonsense as maglev does (welcome to a world where 'intellectual property' is serious business...), then it stands to reason that the chinese gov't is simply taking the 'cheapest right here right now' option.
... and not just the 'so-easy-grandma-can-use-it' kind of standard, but industrially standardized... i.e. thousands of contractors can make rail, and thousands of contractors can make the foundries to make the rail, etc.
the big draw to existing rail systems is that they are -standardized-
due to patents, maglev is a minefield of dangers in the licensing/sub-licensing realm. either invest in -tons- of research to find work-arounds to other teams' intellectual property, or put all that money back in the tried and true: rail.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Funny I am writing from Shanghai at this moment.
The airport maglev is kinda interesting in the way that nobody actually rides it.
Price conscious people takes the bus to major transportation hubs, and convenience / time consicous people takes the taxi (which is only like 15 dollars compared to 10 dollars that the maglev costs - besides the point that the other end station is nowhere near the city and you have to take a cab anyway so it's not that much faster)
so, after a buttload of money, it's not making any of it back except wow points - it might be worth it for an airport shuttle, but you'd bet money has everything to do with it.
that said, I am still taking it in a few days just for the wow factor - but after that it's all taxi since it's so cheap.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You don't really need ultra high speed to beat the airlines. A typical airline journey involves up to two hours waiting at the departure terminal, and half an hour in the disembarkation process at the other end.
On the train? Turn up 10 minutes before it leaves to ensure you don't miss it, get on, find a seat, spend under 5 minutes disembarking at the other end. Also, train stations generally are placed more conveniently than airports which by necessity have to be out of town. It's much easier to put a railway station in the middle of a city.
A TGV-style train going 180 mph will beat an airliner door-to-door on some surprisingly long journeys. If China builds a standard high-speed conventional rail link, it'll probably be good enough.
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Ummm... any large-scale engineering effort of these sorts of things are usually a -very- international effort.
... thats just a tad ignorant my friend, and extremely blissless.
This does matter, to China, and any other government with strong business to maintain, on an International level.
Flippantly assuming that just because the Chinese are the 'Bad Guys' they'll ignore all business regulation, well
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
If it were truly cheaper to maintain in the long run it would be in much wider use, ESPECIALLY in command economies like China. Welcome to the world of Economics.
Uh, whatever. Just because the current administration has budgets and targets to meet, does not mean that they're going to be ambivalent when choosing the 'best option'.
Maglev is unproven on grand-order scales. Rail is seriously proven technology, and more to the point: standard. If the Chinese gov't want to outsource the mfr/design/engineering of super-fast rail-based carriage systems, they can: because these systems exist in an International market, and will be developed. As has already been noted, existing rail systems can be developed to support high-speed/efficiency carriage platforms.
Were there actually maglev implementations committed and standardized in such areas as Europe, the US, perhaps even Australia, then China may have invested a little more in the long-run into grand-order scale (i.e. not just going from here across town) engineering required to do maglev across their vast distances.
They had the potential to do maglev, and do it well, but they also had the potential to end up with a lame duck system which nobody else was using, and therefore which became expensive in the reality of the New World Economy.
Welcome to that, by the way...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Last time I was at Wal-Mart, I was thinking: Gee it's sure a shame that China hasn't benefitted from trade agreements. They only produced a token 80% of the stuff in this store. Clearly, we need to do more.