Japan to Launch Maglev Trains by 2025

SpeedyTrain writes with a link to a story on the Mainichi Daily News site about the future of mass transit in Japan. Despite problems with Maglev technology in test-bed scenarios around the world, Japan has committed to building a line between Tokyo and Nagoya by 2025. The experimental system will allow trains to run at up to 310 miles an hour. "The new magnetically levitated, or "maglev," trains would slash the 100-minute travel time down the country's busiest transportation corridor and are envisioned as a successor for Japan's iconic bullet trains, or shinkansen, first introduced to the world in 1964 ... [a] spokeswoman declined to give an estimate for the cost of linking the capital with the Nagoya area about 269 kilometers (168 miles) to the west. But Kyodo News agency said the whole project would cost about 9 trillion yen (US$76.3 billion) and be divided between the company and the central and local governments."

Comments

Spin

[fiannaFailMan]

Despite problems with Maglev technology in test-bed scenarios around the world,...

Nice little bit of spin there. Was there any technology ever devised that didn't have problems in testing?

Re:Spin

[thrawn_aj]

I agree fiannaFailMan. Some people need to live out their entire lives in a padded room seeing how any kind of risk seems to get them in a tizzy.

Finally, a country has the BALLS to do something novel in the public transport arena. Wish we had more people in the world like the Japanese who've actually gotten over themselves and are quietly progressing without any fuss.

Re:Spin

[SnowZero]

No kidding. Japan already has some maglevs, including a high speed test prototype, and a "slow" one called Linimo which is already in Nagoya. Linimo is already being used for public transport, and I can tell you it works just fine, because I rode on it numerous times. I doubt it was cost-effective to build, but I'm glad that some nation is stepping forward to push the technology, as that's the only way it will become practical.

Re:Spin

[archen]

How do these things hold up to earthquakes anyway? I mean obviously Japan is in an earthquake zone and they already use maglevs, but it seems like the tolerances must be very small in such tech as far as the rails go.

Re:Spin

[buraianto]

Maglev trains don't have rails. The maglev I saw in Japan has wheels on the bottom that retract once the train gets up some speed. The train bottom sits inside a U-shaped track, which has superconducting magnets on both sides and the bottom. These magnets are switched between North and South to match up with the magnets on the train, to pull and push the train along. To steer the train the magnets on either side of the U shape either push a bit or pull a bit to keep the train centered. There is some bit of tolerance within the track, considering the train at speed isn't touching it. I don't know how the track would hold up, but if it does I imagine the train should get by better than a traditional bullet train on rails.

Re:Spin

[TheRaven64]

Over here in Academia, everything works perfectly.

In theory.

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[Tofystedeth]

How many passengers per car? Having seen the way the crowd Japanese trains the answer to that is quite a lot. At least the don't have to worry about securing all that mass for freefall. They can't move anyway.

Japan gets maglev trains, we get a war in Iraq

[tap]

I think I'd rather have the trains.

Re:Japan gets maglev trains, we get a war in Iraq

[WindBourne]

Funny thing is that it really is not the war that is hurting us. We can bear it for sometime. What is really killing us the monster deficits that are being ran up, the absolute corruption that is occuring in the war, the corruption of the politicians, etc. IOW, the problem is the corrupt and inept admin.

Re:Japan gets maglev trains, we get a war in Iraq

[Rei]

You got me curious, so I did a little math.

Cost of the war so far (not counting amount we'll waste before this blunder is done with): $420B.
Cost of superconducting maglev track per mile in the US for long distances: $15-20M. Let's say 20M.
Miles we could build: 21,000
Distance across continental America, east to west: ~2500 mi
Distance across continental America, north to south: ~1250 mi

For that money, we could build ~5 east-west cross-country routes and ~7 north-south routes, or 4 and 9, or whatever. Another way to put it: we could add almost half of our entire length of interstate highways in superconducting maglev. Other methods, like inductrac, could be much cheaper and cover more miles.

Or, we could use the money to kill a bunch of brown people overseas for no good reason. Either way works, I suppose.

Re:Japan gets maglev trains, we get a war in Iraq

[Rotten168]

Actually Japan has one of the highest debt to GDP ratios in the world, so it doesn't seem to be bothering them much as they are earning Slashdot's praise.

Re:Japan gets maglev trains, we get a war in Iraq

[Y-Crate]

What about the cost of bailing out MAGTrak every couple years because no one uses trains?

When your national rail company's trains are largely at the mercy of the scheduling whims of private freight companies there is a strong disincentive to use them.

Add to that the pitiful funding for everything from food to maintenance and what do you expect? Amtrak barely gets enough money to keep the lights on.

Re:Japan gets maglev trains, we get a war in Iraq

[tap]

It would be less than the airline bailouts were.

I've ridden the Shinkansen in Japan. People use them. In Japan we were able to able to meet a friend for breakfast in a city over 150 miles away literally one hour after we walked out the door of our hotel. You can't do anything like that in the United States with our 19th century transportation infastructure. We had trains in this country that ran over 100 mph in the 30s and 40s. Now amtrack's fastest trains go 80 mph and they can't even run them that fast.

Never Underestimate the Japanese

[tecker]

Never underestimate the Japanese. If they set a firm goal that is obtainable then watch out. In the past when they set a goal for themselves they usually achieve it. 20 years is plenty of time to get the technology figured out. The interesting thing will be how they pull it off.

Here is another thing to think about. This opens the door for small startup or research groups that could potentially win a contract if they can create a viable working and safe system. If the little guy can do that then there is some money to be made from the technology both there and around the world. By announcing this the get the people who think they can do it better then the others. Think of the chance and getting your technology in place there like the Xprize for space flight.

I would be more surprised if they didn't pull this one off looking back at history.

Re:Never Underestimate the Japanese

[zergl]

Never underestimate the Japanese. If they set a firm goal that is obtainable then watch out. In the past when they set a goal for themselves they usually achieve it. 20 years is plenty of time to get the technology figured out. The interesting thing will be how they pull it off.

The technology is actually already figured out.
And apart from some accidents caused by human errors it works fine and already is used commercially in Shanghai.

Re:Never Underestimate the Japanese

[samkass]

The 1980's called and want their Japan-can-do-no-wrong attitude back.

Re:Never Underestimate the Japanese

[Diamond Tree]

> Never underestimate the Japanese. If they set a firm goal that is obtainable then watch out.

I think you misunderstand the process at work here: a bureaucracy holding onto its budget. In Japan, budgets, once granted, are uncuttable. MagLev research would continue, ad eternum, regardless of the possibilities of success, with an expanding budget, until some sort of "budgetary catastrophe" (they've already rebuilt their test tracks due to accidents at enormous cost - so I don't think a technical failure would cause abandonment).

If the budget involves the Public Transportation Tribe, with construction costs beyond all description and belief, they just salivate at it. The waste of public taxpayer dollars beggars belief, and doesn't appear to even raise an eyebrow from the citizenry. I was in Tokyo when the Namboku-sen subway line was "finished" and the cost for this line came out to something like $300,000+ _per foot_ ... and that was a conventional subway line (if you don't count the computerized trains that had to be manned anyway and the fact that each station had enclosed platforms (all "for safety").

> Here is another thing to think about. This opens the door for small startup or research
> groups that could potentially win a contract if they can create a viable working and
> safe system.

In Japan there would be no chance of this happening. Research would be handled by JR Group or some quasi-governmental body, and, because venture capital in Japan is basically a joke (they won't invest in startups because "it's too risky") no startups could even get out of the garage. Probably any viable startups would eventually be bought by foreigners (like when Lamborghini bought a boutique Japanese car outfit).

They'll pull it off just by 1) eternal access to money, 2) doggone bullheadedness. Let's just be glad they weren't trying to build the Orion nuclear rockets back in the 1960s ... :o

It wouldn't surprise me if this thing ballooned to half a trillion dollars when you could do almost as well for 1/10th that.

--
learnjapanese.poddedcell.net

Expensive

[Timesprout]

Thats a huge amount of money to lay a short track. How do they plan to recoup initial costs of $454 Million a mile of track?

Re:Expensive

[suyashs]

That's why its partly govt funded...they believe that the economic benefits will recoup the costs, even if the track itself doesn't make money, the time saved in travel will.

Re:Expensive

[zippthorne]

Well that's some poor economic logic.

If it really would improve the economy enough to offset the costs, then the economy should be able to bear the cost of building it through the ticket prices.

Even if they believe that no private company will take the risk, they should expect to get their investment back directly, instead of making it a make-work subsidy. We've got the same problem with make-work programs here in the states, the only one of which you'll find actually worked out was the TVA, which not coincidentally, has been showing a profit for quite some time.

Re:Expensive

[Lars T.]

Thats a huge amount of money to lay a short track. How do they plan to recoup initial costs of $454 Million a mile of track? Wow, what a math genius - you can divide total cost of project by length of track! And you don't even have to care about all the rest, like trains and stations!

But to answer your question, for one they expect the train to be equally profitable as the Shinkansen. They also expect high income from the services and stores at the stations. See this report named "Features and Economic and Social Effects of The Shinkansen" for what they got out of the huge amount of money they paid for the Shinkansen.

Re:Expensive

[Diamond Tree]

Cost is no object. Profit is unnecessary. All that matters is that construction continue. Japan has dammed all but maybe one river (many of them multiple times), built tunnells through mountains so that villages of less than 100 people can have a bullet-train stop(!! move over Sen. Stevens !!), paved many a riverbed in concrete, eliminated dirt from the cities (almost every square inch is paved), etc., etc.

I recall visiting a dam in Nagano that had special turbines so the water could be pumped back *up* into the reservoir behind the dam during the night (luckily the next dam was less than a mile below!) so that extra power could be generated by this dam in the day during the summer so Tokyoites could have air-conditioning. This dam used more power than it made, obviously. (Economically, this scenario might actually make sense, but it is interesting to think about ... could this happen in the US?).

When I lived in Tokyo they tore up my street every few months relaying pipes. First gas, then water, who knows what else. Then a few months later, since the street had been patched so many times, they repaved it. Streets that are 3 years old are routinely torn up (including the concrete kerb) and repaved. They always looked like they still had years and years left of service in them. In the 30 years my family's lived in Northern Virginia (affluent, high-traffic area) I can only think of 1 or 2 times certain major roads in town were repaved.
      From small: http://regex.info/blog/2007-03-25/403
      To large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashi-Kaikyo_Bridge
The likelihood of the projects (for instance the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge) recouping investments is papered over and never taken seriously, except to BS the public or to rationalize the hidden logrolling which is required to acquire the budgets necessary to build the projects.

--
learnjapanese.poddedcell.net (Step Up Nihongo)

From a sociology perspective...

[TechnoGuyRob]

If the commute lowers from two and a half hours to an hour, couldn't workers commute from the fourth largest city to the largest city, meaning it would grow even bigger? Is this a scientific attempt, a transportation time reduction attempt, or an economy boost attempt?

Re:From a sociology perspective...

[Rei]

All of the above.

Tokyo growing further... hard to picture. If you've ever been there, the city just seems to go on and on forever. Check out the satellite view -- look at how it stretches its tendrils across the country. To give a sense of how zoomed out that is, here's the state of Connecticut at the same zoom level.

In Tokyo, I remember never having a sense of where in the city I was. You just sort of disappear into the subways and reappear in a different setting.

Re:From a sociology perspective...

[HalWasRight]

In Tokyo, I remember never having a sense of where in the city I was. You just sort of disappear into the subways and reappear in a different setting.

I just go by where on the Yamanote line I am. No worry about getting on the wrong direction, you'll get there eventually. Not quite like getting on the 405 heading south when you should have been going north. You can loose hours that way.

Slash 100 minuite travel time to what?

[tonycarboni]

581 km/hour traveling 269 kilometers makes the trip makes the trip about 28 minuites, not counting speed up time. I'm sure quite a few people could use those 70 minutes per day.

Re:Slash 100 minuite travel time to what?

[Timesprout]

I'm sure plenty of Japanese companies see this shortened commute as a great opportunity to get an extra hours work out of their employees.

Re:Slash 100 minuite travel time to what?

[geekoid]

I am sure the salaryman will be glad to give it.

Re:Slash 100 minuite travel time to what?

[ghoul]

Actually that would be 70 times 2 as the commute is both ways. 2.5 hours extra time is nothing to be sneezed at. Of course train commute time is not really wasted time. Its not as if you have to keep your eye on the road. You can use it to sleep. When I was going to college in Delhi I had a 2.5 hour bus commute each way. it was either that or driving 1.5 hours on a bike while breathing smoke all the way. At least on the bus I could catch up on my sleep even if I had to change 4 buses to get home. By leaving college at 5 and getting at least an hour of sleep on the buses by the time I was home at 7:30 I was refreshed enough to work on my assignments till 12 at night. Of course after a while it made more sense to stay in the hostel on campus but campus life in Indian Engineering colleges is as brutal as in Russian conscript barracks. (Kidding but a lot of shit does happen in Engineering college hostels and they are not really very conducive to studying)

Re:Slash 100 minuite travel time to what?

[vakuona]

You can use it to sleep Which may not be such a good idea on a train that will stop for less than a minute at your destination station.

Re:Slash 100 minuite travel time to what?

[KDR_11k]

Then you just leave at the next station and take the train in the opposite direction.

Re:Slash 100 minuite travel time to what?

[ghoul]

That is why wristwatches and PDAs have alarms. Since bullet trains run pretty much to timetable you can get on set your alarm for 5 minutes before your station and go to sleep.

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[SL Baur]

How many passengers per car? Having seen the way the crowd Japanese trains the answer to that is quite a lot. Nope, not in the way you think. The shinkansen is nice, with the equivalent in space to something a bit larger than business class in an airplane and it's a big train.

Per car in the Nozomi (the express-est of the express bullet trains), there's something like 15 rows of seats with 5 seats per row with 16 cars per train. The two Green Cars (first class, sort of) are a little more spacious - 4 seats per row, but not much more.

The route I presume will be from Tokyo/Yokohama to Nagoya which along the same shinkansen route that continues on to Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Hiroshima, goes underwater and ends up in Hakata in Kyushu. Most of the passengers go from Tokyo to Osaka, but I understand why they're not doing the Maglev train all the way to Osaka yet, it's fairly flat up until Nagoya, then there are a lot of hills between Nagoya and Osaka.

I love the trains in Japan. I'm sure they will do this one just as well as they did the shinkansen.

Not using Inductrack?!

[KonoWatakushi]

While the article is scarce on technical details, that is an immense sum of money. (Perhaps, in part, due to the landscape?) If the numbers at Wikipedia are correct, it is seven times the cost per unit length of the Shanghai TransRapid track. It would seem unimaginable for an Inductrack system to cost this much though.

So, I have to ask, why? Inductrack is a brilliant design, and would make Maglev's much cheaper and better in just about every way. Inductrack is a completely passive levitation system, which requires no electromagnets or control circuits to maintain stable levitation. You can't buy a finished system today, but the theory is proven, and it would almost certainly be a more sensible investment.

Inductrack is a direct extension of ideas which made possible the passive magnetic bearings in earlier Flywheel Energy Storage systems. Basically, it uses a linear Halbach Array instead of a cylindrical one. Very cool technology, all around.

Re:Not using Inductrack?!

[hackingbear]

Well... Inductrack is an American invention. it is unimaginable for it to be used in Japan where they take great prides in their high-speed train technologoes including their design of the superconducting maglev trains.

It is unfortunate that there is not even a short commercially operating Inductrack in the US. Maybe the car companies should be blamed.

Re:Not using Inductrack?!

[Echnin]

Wow, you need to stop crying about the fact that the Xbox sold poorly in Japan. Get over it! This myth about Japanese "pride" keeping them from using foreign technologies is absurd.

Mmmm, half a billion per mile

[Colin Smith]

Bargain... Just like most other transit projects...

BTDT

[djupedal]

I love riding the MagLev in Shanghai - most of the passengers are usually Japanese tourists, snapping photos of the overhead display as it reads higher and higher speeds until that magic number of 433 - running the length in 7 minutes and 20 seconds. The fun is over much too soon...

Re:launchED, as in past tense.

[njh]

Impressive that you can get from Shanghai, China, to Japan in just 19 miles. Just shows the world is getting smaller all the time!

Re:launchED, as in past tense.

[mrorange764]

yes, but so fashionably late. :)

Re:launchED, as in past tense.

[mystery_boy_x]

What's worse: that someone comments that Shanghai is in Japan, or that it gets moderated as "Informative"?

Share costs with physics researchers?

[pioneerX]

The track should be routed via Shizuoka and Nagano so it can double as a high-energy collider. Though probably not at the same time.

Planned route is new

[Hebetsubeach]

The planned route is quite different than the current shinkansen. It would run from Tokyo west to Kofu, through Nagano and Gifu prefectures. Much of the route is mountainous so there would be numerous tunnels. You'll find a proposed route at www.linear-chuo-exp-cpf.gr.jp. The site is in Japanese but even if you can't read Japanese, there are many illustrations.

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[JanneM]

"Sorry, but on busy holidays, shinkansen trains are also standing-room-only. I speak from experience."

Well, if you voluntarily travel during Golden Week you deserve it, I guess :) You know it's bad when Japanese news programs have segments on how crowded it is.

Normally, though, the Shinkansen really is very comfortable. And I really like that they run so often - about once every fifteen minutes between Osaka and Tokyo - that you never have to worry about a timetable or anything; just show up and get a ticket for the next train.

China got MagLev - and will have more soon

[STDK]

From Pudon international airport to the center of Shanghai. It's about 30 km and takes 7 min. It is a VERY cool ride. Perfectly balanced you do not feel the G's at all. In the 2 curves it seems to be leaning som 25 degrees but do to the perfecly balanced speed you can not feel it. It is a very strange experience, passing the expresse way and not being able to see what way the cars go because you are soooooo much faster. The chinese are also building MagLev from Shanghai to Hangzhou and down along the southern coast. Several places you can see the carrier-beams and the holes in the mountains already. The trail will go Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nimbo and streight south. http://www.smtdc.com/en/index.asp for more information STDK

Re:China got MagLev - and will have more soon

[pangloss]

From Pudon international airport to the center of Shanghai.

Longyang station is far from what I would call the center of Shanghai. Longyang station (the western terminus of the Maglev line) is still in Pudong--i.e., literally east of the Huangpu river. The Wikipedia article refers to the inconvenient location of the Longyang terminus and notes "[t]here is significant local criticism that the project was showy and wasteful, delivering no practical benefit to residents".

I was also surprised by the quality of the ride. It's actually a little rough/bumpy feeling at times, which is not at all what I would have expected from a magnetically levitated transport. Nevertheless, it's a fun ride and even with transferring at Longyang station, it's cheaper and marginally faster than taking a taxi from the airport to Puxi (west of the Huangpu river). In fact, these are precisely the reasons I'll be taking the Maglev again, when I arrive in Shanghai tomorrow :)

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[shimpei]

Actually, the maglev line will not run parallel to the Shinkansen line on the coast, but will go through the mountainous regions of central Japan, incorporating the test line segment in Yamanashi. The line will act as a backup in case the existing Shinkansen line gets destroyed by a major earthquake or a volcano eruption (specifically Mt. Fuji).

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[shimpei]

Well, yes, but there's this thing called "reserved seating," which you are welcome to purchase for the holidays if you can plan ahead. It's really no better or worse than airlines, except you do have the option of standing when you're cheap and/or capricious and are really desperate.

Airplanes have a further disadvantage in that, after landing, you still have to stand on the local trains for quite a while to get to the final destination. Shinkansen stations in most cities are much closer to the city center.

Re:Yawn.

[shimpei]

Very smart. Very smart, young man. Now go build me a new runway to land that aircraft. The existing ones in Tokyo are booked full, you know.

Re:Terrorism targets?

[ghoul]

The reason the Japanese can concentrate on development without worrying about security is that they dont go into other countries and piss off a bunch of other people. Do you really think if the US military was not deployed in 150 countries all around the world Americans would still have to worry about terrorism? I dont think so. So a bunch of Muslims want to kill a bunch of Jews. What do we care. If America would just get out of the middle east and stop supporting Israel with money and arms I am sure the Mullahs would be too busy blowing up Israelis to care about blowing anything American up. Terrorism is just the cost you pay for having imperialist foreign policies. The Japanese learnt the hard way that an Imperialist foreign policy is not good. Unfortunately or fortunately America has not lost a war fought on its own soil in almost 2 centuries (the last war America lost was when the Canadians whooped Americas ass in 1812) so for Americans war is just a game and they keep supporting imperialist policies. Given the overwhelming strength of the US army terrorism is pretty much the only way the other side can fight back. It is kind of like how the founding fathers had to use terrorism to gain independence as there was no way they could stand up to the might of the British army.

This is marketing

[ghoul]

Japan doesnt really need any more faster trains. At the rate their population is falling soon even Tokyo will have vacancies at reasonable rents so the need for going further and further out is not really urgent. But India and China with their huge populations and limited land (if you dont count deserts China is actually smaller than India) do need them and in 20 years time when they can afford maglevs on a large scale who are they going to buy from? From those who have working systems in place so this is more of a demo for sales purposes and hence the costs are justified. Pretty much for the same reasons the French and Germans are building fast trains- so they can sell to the Indians and Chinese.

Re:Yawn.

[flanktwo]

Yep, when this is built it will be much more convenient to travel out of Tokyo, check in for your flight, board the flight, wait to take off, fly to Nagoya, wait to get your bags at the other end, and then catch a train into the city. Or, you could just catch a nice fast train from the centre of Tokyo to the centre of Nagoya.

Re:Yawn.

[Rotten168]

Or you could just drive. But I don't understand the big deal everybody has with flying. Anyway, excuse me if I fail to be impressed with a vehicle that barely goes 1/2 as fast as a mode of transportation that's widely used in the US.

Re:Yawn.

[Rotten168]

Eh? What does that have to do with what I said?

What?!

[siodine]

A society planning 20 years into the future ... I thought that was an impossibility due to the human condition.

Re:Yawn.

[ghoul]

Total travel time is the issue. If you take a train you are at the trains maximum speed for most of the time and you go from city centre to city centre so even if planes have a faster maximum speed for short distances and taking into account the take off and landing speeds train travel can actually be faster. It is much more difficult to go fast on the ground due to issues like safety (a cow walking across the track) and friction and earthquakes. So getting a train to go that fast is more of an engineering marvel than getting a plane to go fast. As far as driving goes that is probably the worst form of commuting. Driving is fine for long drives in the countryside and for communing with nature but if I am spending 2 hours a day commuting I want to be able to use that time to do some work on my laptop or at least sleep but if you drive you have to spend that time driving. I wish American cities would develop a culture of trains.

Re:Yawn.

[Rotten168]

Planes have a much faster maximum speed for long distances... the advantages become negligible for short distances. And train travel is less safe than air travel for exactly the reasons you mentioned among others. And most cities do have commuting rail. I don't consider getting a train to go fast an engineering marvel at all, more like a waste of time. And maglev technology is notoriously expensive, so tickets will be ungodly expensive unless it's subsidized, which is what train kooks really want in the end.

76 *ucking BILLION for 310 miles/hour by 2025?!?

[Adeptus_Luminati]

For 76 *ucking billion, I wanna see mach 5 jet engines on the back of the train in 2 years!

That sounds like a hella lot of waste for nothing, a long time from now!

In 10 years we'll have free energy & in 20, teleportation. 310 miles per hour will sound like walking compared to flying an F18 with the technology they'll have in 2025.

Adeptus

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[SL Baur]

Well, actually that always when I took the Shinkansen. I lived the life of the typical salaryman and had my home in Tokyo, but was forced to work in Kobe for awhile and I basically took it from Friday after work, Kobe to Tokyo and Sunday evening Tokyo to Kobe every weekend for about a year. That's as "rush hour" as it gets. Oh, when I traveled Golden Week, I just bought a Green Car ticket, they wouldn't sell me anything else. I was also traveling that route when the FIFA whatever it was, was in Kobe and gaijin were returning to Tokyo.

I had to stand several times on the express shuttle train to Narita, but never on the Shinkansen.

The Japanese built the Shinkansen to impress people, mainly visiting gaijin like us, but hey, they did it right! I am so impressed at Japanese trains in general, but the Shinkansen is a train system done *right* in my opinion.

Maybe you're confusing the Nozomi with something else or you're talking about a different line.

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[SL Baur]

Actually, the maglev line will not run parallel to the Shinkansen line on the coast Very clever, if they're doing it for redundancy. The line along the coast follows the ancient Tokaido path. Do you mean they have chosen the Koshukaido for the maglev? That's only a sentimental question. I used to live off the Koshukaido in Setagaya ku.

(Call me racist if you wish, but I've worked with Japanese in Japan and despite serious problems with their educational system, the average Japanese engineer runs circles around the average American engineer).

Broken Promises

[dorpus]

I grew up in Japan in the 1970s, and I had picture books that talked about how maglev trains would connect Japan's cities in the 1980s.

Oh and, weren't we supposed to have cities in space by now? Using computers that still spat out ticker-tape, of course.

Re:Terrorism targets?

[hes, MD]

Actually, Europeans think of Canada as a beautiful and benevolent country (albeit a bit chilly), and its inhabitants as sympathetic people. Rest assured that the United States are beheld with slightly more criticism.

Concrete cancer on Shinkansen

[Ox0065]

I heard a rumour that there was concrete cancer on the shinkansen track from Tokyo to Nagoya. They painted it with some obscenely expensive paint system to fix it. Maybe that's the reason for the selection of that run for this new system.

Heard about a guy who lived in Osaka & worked in Tokyo (three hours each way) His teiki (month pass) was the same as my salary back then. Must have had one hell of a wife, one way or the other.

Re:Not really a sensible terrorism target!

[Ox0065]

If you wanted to piss off the Japanese (probably not wise), you wouldn't start with the Shinkansen or similar. There are plenty of lines in & around Tokyo that are more critical. Its also pretty hard to steer a train into anything worthwhile. Some sort of physics thing apparently.

Re:Tokyou?

[6Yankee]

Why would anyone purposely built a train system with a school as terminal station?

Keeps the train-perverts concentrated on one line...

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[TheRaven64]

As a visiting gaijin from the UK, the thing that amazed me about the Shinkansen was the scheduling. When I arrived at the platform, there was a second-accurate counter telling me when it would arrive. Here in the UK, if we get arrivals down to the nearest ten minutes, we're doing pretty well (note to Libertarians: if you want to see why privatising infrastructure is a bad idea, come and visit us). I have no idea how representative this is, since I only made a single trip (a fun day; bus to the nearest big city, train to the nearest Shinkansen stop, Shinkansen to Tokyo, subway then limited express to Narita, and then being rushed past security because my plane was supposed to start boarding as I arrived at the check-in desk).

Actually, they got it from a german company

[tenco]

Transrapid. History of Transrapid development

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[putaro]

You can usually set your watch by the Shinkansen. Japanese trains usually are run on schedule to at least the minute. When the train is late it's a big deal. They used to give out excuse slips if the train was significantly late so you could show your boss that the reason you were late was because the train screwed up.

Re:Yawn.

[vakuona]

You are very much mistaken. The Japanese bullet has run profitably. For a very long time. Which is more than you can generally say about the airline industry. (Where's Pan Am).

The Japanese bullet has not had a single passenger fatality in over 40 years of operation. And that in an earth quake and natural disaster prone country, is impressive. Slower US trains have had higher fatalities over the past 40 years.

Bullet trains are much more comfortable than planes. More comfortable than cars. (You can get up and stretch), and far less likely to kill you. There are way to minimise or eliminate accidental blockage of the track. Shield the track in areas were you are likely to get cows just milling about unsupervised. Have fewer or no level crossings. Those are problem which can and have been solved in most countries with high speed trains. There has only been one large high speed train disaster in years (In Germany). High speed trains probably have the best safety record of any mass transit system.

Edinburgh to Glasgow...

[tiluki]

Funnily enough, this other story was out last week: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_we st/6577311.stm?ls So, at least one other "push" to use the technology for the public good. Sure, it might (see probably) not happen, but it would be great to travel from the East to West coast of Scotland in 15 minutes!

Re:Terrorism targets?

[AaronLawrence]

Indeed. From here, Canada looks like what the US should be, but hasn't been for some time (if ever).

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[SL Baur]

You can usually set your watch by the Shinkansen. Japanese trains usually are run on schedule to at least the minute. I found that it was wise to do exactly that - if my watch/keitai time didn't match the time shown in the station to within less than a minute I reset my own time. I learned my lesson fairly quickly the first (and only) time I was late for the last highway bus leaving Tokyo Station by about 25 seconds. Fortunately, there was still one more Joban-sen train so I was still able to get somewhat close to where I needed to go.

Is anyone familiar with the game Densha de GO! ? My understanding is that the scoring rules in that game match how train drivers are scored in real life. You not only have to be (exactly) on time, you have to stop the train within a couple of inches of the exact stop at the same time. Newer train lines like the Mita-sen subway in Tokyo and the shinkansen block the tracks except for the place the doors of the train are supposed to be.

Re:Yawn.

[Rotten168]

That is interesting, I do know that in Europe high speed rail is expensive and has to operate with massive subsidies, and even then a ticket price is more expensive than airplane ticket. But bottom line, were we to make air travel more comfortable, it would be comfortable AND faster than train travel. I'm not impressed by the statistics when it's still fundamentally slower than what US citizens use to travel. The US uses a different model than Europe, we transport freight by rail and figure people would rather travel by automobile. Maybe in denser areas, rail will become more viable, but as long a Amtrak is gumming up the works by offering lines on unprofitable routes (due to political pressure), rail will probably never take off. I think Amtrak is actually preventing the development of rail in the US.

Re:Terrorism targets?

[KDR_11k]

High speed trains usually have loads of detectors for anything blocking the rail and might actually be harder to hit than, say, a regional train doing 180 km/h during rush hour. It's not like maglevs are any more vulnerable than regular trains. Their speed doesn't really matter since you won't be able to direct it at any target and all you get done is kill the passengers which you can do just fine on today's trains already.

Re:Terrorism targets?

[Lars T.]

Seems to me that a terrorist hit on one of these trains would be much easier than hitting an airliner. At those speeds, a lot of damage could be done. And the terrorist would not even have to kill himself in the process. All else aside - why exactly would a terrorist need to kill himself to bring down a plane?

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[poopdeville]

GOMU GOMU NO ROCKETO!!!!!!!!

Re:Yawn.

[SvnLyrBrto]

Oh... don't forget the other two major pains-in-the-ass when it comes to flying:

1) No need to book your ticket a month in advance if you don't want to get absolutely raped on the fare. Just show up, buy your ticket, and hop on the next train to Osaka (Every fifteen minutes, IIRC.)

2) Okay, this one is related to #1, but applies more here in the US... There's none of this: "Arrive three hours before your departure time, check in, and wait in line for some TSA knuckledragger to feel you up, ransack your belongings, and accuse you of everything from terrorism to drug running to money laundering to prostitution to communism, then wait some more so the flight crew can stock the plane with lemon-soaked paper napkins, and remove a "suspicious" (too brown-looking) passenger." bullshit. With the Shinkansen, you just show up... maybe five or ten minutes before your departure... get on your train, and go.

I swear... I'm not *afraid* of flying by a long shot. But it's turned into such a major pain in the ass here, that I've actually seriously considered taking Amtrack next time I travel domestically.

cya,
john

where the money really comes from

[Diamond Tree]

In Japan the game is - regarding construction boondoggles (think FDR-style public works, CCC, etc.) - to use taxpayer *SAVINGS* not tax revenues! This outstandingly clever scheme involves the government raiding the postal savings system as a hidden budget. The Japanese postal savings system has over a trillion in savings - making it by far the world's largest "bank." Koizumi had a goal to get the government's grasping hands out of these near-bottomless coffers but I don't think he succeeded. I highly doubt anyone else will be able to muster the political authority or public support necessary to even get as far as he did. Because most Japanese households have at least one postal-savings account, and their rate of saving is very high, raiding the postal savings system looks irresistible to politicians. Hey, everyone's doing it.

--
learnjapanese.poddedcell.net (Step Up Nihongo - Bobby Valentine's favorite Japanese textbook)

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[jrumney]

When I was there in the late '80s they already had the route mapped out for the Nagoya-Osaka section of the maglev, via Mie and Nara rather than the Gifu-Kyoto route of the Shinkansen.

Re:Terrorism targets?

[ghoul]

A terrorist attack is small potatoes. I am referring to the day in day out carpet bombing which cities in Europe and Japan saw during WW2 which turned these countries into pacifists. Americans in general dont really know what war does to you when its happening in the street outside your home. Till a long drawn out war happens on American soil , Americans will always be too willing to go to war elsewhere.

Re:They plan to launch trains now from Japan?

[shimpei]

Yes, it will roughly trace the ancient Koshukaido-Nakasendo route, but it was due to pork-barreling efforts by the corrupt politician Shin Kanemaru more than any engineering considerations.

Re:Yawn.

[Rotten168]

But what happens when terrorists decide to target high speed rail? I don't think it's fair to criticize the security measures taken when you take air travel. Would you feel safer flying with no security precautions taken whatsoever?