Slashdot Mirror
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.
If you're american, you just proved them right. There is 1.6 kilometers in a mile, not 2.
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. --
Even China cannot justify the expense of a maglev train from Bejing to Shanghai.
I remember reading somewhere that they've decided to construct a regular high speed rail line instead, similar to France's TGV or Germany's ICE. Economically, it makes a lot more sense, and until the dedicated high speed line is constructed, the trains can use the current railroad infrastructure that is already in place.
Here's a link to the proposal, which has been in planning for a while already. The Chinese have already constructed a prototype high-speed train engine based on the Swedish X2000 train.
Regular high-speed rail as opposed to a maglev line also makes expansion to other regions of the country a lot easier.
Still, a long-distance maglev line would have been really cool, and there's got to be a region where it would make economical sense as well. Maybe we'll see one in Japan first.
I'm from germany. I've always liked the maglev/transrapid and I really like the fast normal trains (ICE/TGV). But I hope the chinese know that in order to let these trains reach their high speeds you have to build modern tracks. If you put a fast train on a 100year old track, you will never be able to reach 300km/h. And if you intend to use the existing tracks, probably along with freight-trains and normal slow trains, you won't reach them either. In france the TGV is so fast, because it has its own sperate track system and because the french don't give a f*ck on the people living along those tracks.
It's a shame that this failed as I can see Maglev providing a cheaper, safer, more comfortable and environmentally friendly way of replacing planes for internal (country wise) travel. The Swiss seem to see the benefits of this method and take it one step further. They have the Swiss Metro project (www.swissmetro.com) coming up, and that looks very promising. Imagine a train running down a vacuumed tube (so no air resistance to slow the train down and you've got no wheels with friction) and you only have to use energy to get up to the speed you want plus of course the energy to keep the train afloat. It cruises the rest of the way like you're in space at 100s of km/h - maybe even 1000s. Check the link out - it's a good read.
If you put a fast train on a 100year old track, you will never be able to reach 300km/h.
Yes you will, but only once. The French did speed trials in the 70s with conventional train engines and cars (well, apart the engine that had more power), to test the limits of conventional railways, and they reached about 300Km with that train, but the rail track behind the train was all bent out of shape as a result. I saw a very impressive photo of that bent track once, but I can't seem to find it anymore.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
it involved *PROGRESS* which they seem to admit is difficult for them to deal with...
This is a country that whose output has grown at least 7%/year for the past 10 years, a country experiencing massive internal migration and social change. Uh yeah, a country really opposed to progress.
If you don't know, Beijing and Shanghai are not that close (around 1000km) which makes it an ideal short haul air route. Less urgent freight/journeys can go via the existing (or upgraded) rail intrastructure, high speed journeys can be made now by air. The maglev would be great if it were a cheap tried and tested technology, but it is not, and there are alternatives.
How about some 1st world countries try it out, not waiting to live off the backs of 3rd world countries trying something new? I'd like to see this sort of thing between the ~400km route of NY and DC, for example... a much more suitable distance, centre of town to centre of town.
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.
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. --
The true high speed trains (like some in france, and the new one going under the mountain chain in Europe, I don't remember what it's called) have to use specially layed track. Those sorts of high speed trains (due to the speed and the wave in the track that it generates ahead of the train) cannot handle the "flaws" used in regular track. It needs track that is bound much more securely to the ground to limit the wave generated in the rail, requires a sturdier railbed, require very strait track (only very gradual curves due to the speed) and many of them are electric requiring lines to be run anyways.
It's not as simple as everyone thinks to just slap a high speed train on regular track.
And, it's quiet, and doesn't shake. Ever tried ordering coffee from a train kiosk?
Actually, modern trains do offer very comfortable travelling. All you need is modern, well laied rails and good trains. The ICE 3 (the latest German high speed trains) have all axes of all carts powered. Thus you get very smooth acceleration. In a train station, you don't notice the train setting off.
As for standards and international compatibility, there are a few drawbacks in today's railway system, at least in Europe: As far as I know, the width of the rails is standardized by now, but it hasn't always been that way. In most European countries, the US, Canada, China and most of Australia the width is the British standard of 1435mm. But countries such as Spain, Portugal, Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, SA, Japan (apart from their high speed train), Malaisia, Pakistan have different rail systems.
Most, if not all, far distance tracks are electrically powered, but different countries use different systems, mainly 15kV 16 2/3 Hz AC (eg Germany) and 25kV 50Hz AC (eg France). That makes cross border train operation difficult, but there are trains that can operate on both systems, such as the French Thalys, a TGV that commutes between Paris and Cologne.
If you are interested, you might look here
I think it's an error to consider maglevs as trains. Maglevs have many things in common with planes, so you should make comparisons between maglevs and planes. Why? Because of their sheer speed- and safety-potential. They can , once it becomes a mature technology , replace planes on many occasions: 1) They are almost predestined to commute at distances between 200 km and 1000 km (2000?3000?). You don't stop/start a thing of several 100tons every odd 10km; so by it's nature a maglev could stop/start every 1 to 3 hours ,roughly every 200 to 800 km.
2) It is very difficult to derail,
3) It can't fall out of the sky,
4) It should be able to travel in weather conditions impossible for planes,
5) you don't need something as big , loud and expensive as an airport-infrastructure
In my opinion it's only a matter of time...
less is more
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, right. I present the following parable:
So, this economics professor and his student are walking along the street, and the student spots a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. Being a starving student, he says, "Look, there's a twenty! We should pick it up and buy some lunch."
And the professor, being an economist, shakes his gray-bearded head and says sagaciously, "No, no, that's impossible."
"What are you talking about?" asks the student. "It's right there!"
"Well, you see," says the professor with a chuckle, "if there were really money lying on the sidewalk, someone would have picked it up already."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Many people here seem to think that the Maglev could be one of those technologies, where China leapfrogs TGV/ICE trains. While it's cheaper in the long-term, in other cases of leap-frogging the capital outlay has often been lower for more advanced solutions. Installing the infrastructure for a cell-phone network, for example, is 10 times cheaper than putting in old-fashioned land-lines.
In some cases, the capital outlay is a bit higher, but the pay-back period is very short.
Compact fluorescent light-bulbs are more expensive than regular ones, but if you have it on 4 hours a day you will save more in energy cost than the cost of the light-bulb. Return on investment is 100%, and you don't even need to but such items on a budget. China is also in the lead for LED cluster bulbs, which give even better energy efficiency and full-spectrum light.
Other good candidates for leapfrogging:
Unlike the Maglev, these technologies save capital that is scarce in growing economies, and have multiple positive side-effects. Much as my geeky side would like to one day replace planes and very noisy TGVs with levitation trains, prices are still prohibitive.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"