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Germany To Build New Maglev Railway
EWAdams writes "According to the BBC, the Bavarian state government has announced that it has signed an agreement with Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway system, and the Transrapid consortium, to provide a maglev railway between central Munich and its airport. The only other maglev in full operation at the moment is in Shanghai, again as a city-to-airport service. The cost of the system is estimated at $2.6 billion. No completion date has been announced."
Shouldn't they just invest that in Facebook?
I hear it's going to be big!
I bet you can buy a lot more for your 2.6 billion.
They will be like North Haverbrook.
liqbase
Will it be cat friendly?
I like to put pennies on the train tracks. Maglev trains take all the fun out of it!
In hell, you will find a mountain of broken, feces-covered typewriters and a stack of copies of the First Folio.
Will it run on time?
Imagine how wonderful it would be to have such a system between, say, JFK airport and Grand Central Station. But that makes way too much sense, from almost any view, to ever have a chance of actually happening in my lifetime.
The Maglev in Shanghai (built by the Germans) is great fun. The ride takes less than 10 minutes, and you hit a top speed of 433kph - smooth as glass.
:)
You can frequently find Japanese tour groups that will ride back & forth between the airport and downtown, like it was a theme park ride
When the Shanghai Maglev first went online, ridership was fairly low. The ticket cost is a bit high in local terms... Today, with the Olympics right around the corner, ridership means the train is usually full.
Plans are in place to build the next one as a longer leg, perhaps between Shanghai and Nanjing.
Halbach Arrays would allow them to build a magnetically levitating train without active control of the magnets. The track would be nothing more than a series of aluminum or copper rings. The levitation doesn't work when the train is stationary, but secondary wheels only designed for low speed on a prepared surface could handle this. (Failure mode away from stations would be for the train to drag its belly. It could be designed to ear up the track, but ensure the passengers safety.) Electromagnetic drag also decreases as the speed of the train increases.
The resulting track and train would both cost a fraction of what they are currently spending. Both the levitation and guide magnets would be totally passive.
At 2.6 Billion that is only about 2-weeks of Iraq war.
Which would you rather have? A shiny new Maglev or 2-weeks of war. Those Europeans have a warped sense of priorities.
...what's the point in overpriced railway?
Just dont carry any hard/floppy disks, or Cassette/VHS/IBM370 tapes or other mag media on this train.
Your Donna Summer 8-Track will not survive..
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
Do you think it'll encourage more than 8% of journeys to be made by rail?
"OECD in Figures 2005 - Transport"
http://www.oecd.org/topicstatsportal/0,3398,en_2825_497139_1_1_1_1_1,00.html
Or is it just a way for politicians to make themselves look good while wasting vast quantities of money?
Deleted
What about the Linimo in Japan running from Fujigaoka in Nagoya Japan? That's a maglev isn't it? And it's been running for over 2 years now.
Bavaria's minister-president Edmund Stoiber is quite well known for his often outrageously unintentionally funny speeches. And because the Transrapid maglev will be built in Bavaria, he also had his say.
If you're going from the main station in 10 Minutes without having to ckeck in at the airport, then you're basically starting your flight from the airportIt happened quite some time ago, but nonetheless led to quite some laughter in Germany. It's rather confusing, even in German. A recording can be seen here. For everyone not speaking German, here is a fairly rough translation (but watching the video helps. One just cannot capture this utter confusion by means of text):
Your question is like asking what's the point in hybrid cars because they cost more than a comparable traditional car. The up-front cost is recouped in later savings and it's better for the environment generally, while actually offering a higher standard of service. It's simply a better railway.
I piss off bigots.
What happens when you are one of those poor souls with a metal plate in your head or elsewhere? Does the magnetic field fuck with you? I know some people can't have MRI's for that reason.
Having flown several times into and out of Munich before, I know what the current connection between the airport and the city is like: a complete nightmare. So I fully understand that they want to do something about it. But this maglev project of theirs is a complete waste of resources, economically (way too expensive) and technically (way to many dedicated material inputs). What they really should do, IMHO, is upgrade the rail connection to use standard high speed ICE trains. That's a lot cheaper and about just as effective.
This Maglev is only worth it for really long distances, like the Hamburg-Berlin line they once planned. But then again, there are good reasons why that is not working out. In short, I love the technology, but after about 30 years they should at long last admit that it was a practical failure and can the thing. But certain people can't admit mistakes and certain others (e.g. someone the Germans will be able to identify as soon as I write "Edmund" :-) ) are looking to build a monument for themselves at all cost (that idea totally fits his personality and current cereer status, by the way).
Linux user since early January 1992.
Wow, I had to really tilt my head far to the side while listening to that. Listened to it multiple times for a grand total of... ten minutes!
Hmm, oddity as well to note that the captcha for this post is Drunken...
Actually for one of the companies involved in building the Maglev.
Copper theft is a problem mostly in open tracks but this one would be closed. The computer systems used can monitor intrusions onto closed tracks but only usually monitor intrusions in closed areas on open tracks like where PLCs are located (the controlers that work things like switches and interlockings etc). Also most new tracks are often made accessable only by maintenence trains rather than just being able to "walk" out onto the tracks.
In the cases of attempted copper theft on open tracks...I have some pretty gory stories that usually start with "what's that smell?"
To Grand Central? That is hardly enough room to build up speed. How about JFK to LAX?
do the Germans think these make them look all "high-tech"? it just makes them look foolish.
Don't forget, about 7 years ago, that would've been about $1.3 Billion. Why not just list the price in Euros? We have enough people here that know what it is; plus, then the pricing doesn't need to be re-adjusted constantly.
Offtopic Prediction: 10 years from now, the USD will have fallen dramatically because commodities have begun to transfer from being traded in USD to either the Euro or the Yuan
Maglevs are expensive but achieve performance in term of people transportation that just can't be achieved with cars, even in a country where there's no generalized upper limit on the highways (although, I've heard, with all local speed limitations, nowaday it's hard to find long enough sectors to try to achieve mad speeds with a car).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
How about JFK to LAX?
Because it would not be competitive with jet travel over long haul routes like that. The maglev competes with short hop flights not long haul trips.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train
I hope the German one turns out to be more technically reliable.
One has to wonder if it's really worth the money, or is it just a boondoggle? German tax rates are already very high, among the highest in Europe. These high taxes are responsible for much industry moving to, or starting in, other EC countries with much lower costs, such as Slovakia or even Ireland (Ireland has low taxes but other costs are now getting quite high). This is quite a problem, particularly in the East, where the industrial base is not as developed as in the West. The West has many highly skilled jobs, such as R&D, that cannot be easily moved to other countries nor easily replicated by those countries. The East gets both bad parts of both underdeveloped countries - the high taxes and expenses of being in Germany with the economic development of Romania.
I am not saying that the West hasn't put a lot of money into fixing up the east since reunification. In fact, the German government has spent more money fixing the East than the US has destroying Iraq. Industry is slowly moving into the east, at least in the larger cities (Dresden and Leipzig), but its pace is slow. It could be sped up by lowering taxes.
I wonder about expensive German projects like the railway tunnel under the center of Leipzig. It's Leipzig's version of Boston's "Big Dig". It has a cost of over 20,000 eu per Leipzig resident! While it is appealing from a transportation point of view and exciting from a civil engineering one, I don't see it as being worth the price. The Munich project sounds similarly unjustified.
All this having been said, I am not 100% just of myself. I have never been to Munich, I don't know how bad the airport travel is. It's also possible that much of this spending will in fact (rather than in rhetoric) be an investment which can be recouped by future sales to other cities and countries. Perhaps some of the R&D necessary has already been done in the Shanghai project.
As far as what one poster said about New York: Surely, you jest. It would be so expensive and poorly constructed, if done in and by New Yorkers, that it wold make Boston's Big Dig look like a swiss watch by comparison. I don't think that New York has the wherewithal to build another wonder of the industrial world on the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge. Hopefully, they'll know enough not to attempt it. I have considerably more confidence in the competence and honesty of Germans in completing such a large project.
They might meet some resistance...
Not while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, about to merge into one super-commodities exchange, as well as NYMEX and NYBOT, remain among the premier commodities exchanges in the world, and we're not even looking at Futures and Options being traded at the likes of Chicago Board Options Exchange (as well as F&O trading that happens at CME and CBOT). We're also forgetting that NYSE bought Euronext (and thus London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange).
Long story short, I wouldn't worry too much about this if I were you.
If you're headed to Shanghai *don't* take the maglev.
The Shanghai system doesn't actually go anywhere... it gets about halfway (30KM?) from downtown before it just stops.
Interesting in a "we're hip, we've got a maglev" way, but sure would be more useful if you could take it to and from the airport.
Interesting to read about this and a related post ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=308361&cid=20749751 ) I actually did a small project at high school about maglev stuff and, at the time, the Seraphim engine + tech was the 'cutting edge' direction things seemed to be going in.
Rather than having the track be the motor (as per the german tracks), the Seraphim engine had the motor inside the vehicle instead. And instead of relying on full levitation, it mostly used the magnetic forces for propulsion and deceleration (braking), with only some of it used to generate a small amount of lift; leaving conventional wheel systems to do most of the support carrying; claiming that wheel friction is much less of an issue than air friction.
Though my critical note on that system was that the company didn't mention anything about wear&tear to any such wheel systems when going about at 300km/h and above, day in day out.
They claim...
The track between Munich and the airport is 37km; 23 miles long. A conventional express train (not even ICE) could do that easily in 20 minutes if it doesn't stop at each station. The maglev will do it in 10 mins.
Wouldn't it make more sense to operate the Maglev over a distance which would allow it to save a significant amount of time? i.e. Actually inter city?
Oh, and I don't believe those cost/mile figures for a second. Any of them.
Deleted
The tax rates in Germany are _not_ out of the European average.
It's the additional cost of the social security systems which drives the labor cost high.
O the total money the employer has to pay (that's high than the salary,
as the employer "pays" 50% of most social security fees), the employee gets sometimes
only 54%, pre tax. That also depends on you total income as there are caps
for the social security fees...
The employee has to pay even taxes on some of the social security fees (the 50% he "pays")
as they are included in the taxable salary (he gets the money as salary, hence tax, and has to pays into the
social security system immediately...involuntarily)....
...and there is more information about it here.
Inductrack is a brilliant technology, and not only can the principles be be used to produce cheap passively levitated trains, they also allow for the creation of passive magnetic bearings. While Halbach Arrays are very interesting themselves, and ideal for this system, they are not inherently necessary.
The parent is correct about the cost though; this technology should be inexpensive enough to allow for wide scale adoption of Maglevs. Why we are still squandering enormous wads of cash on the existing designs is truly baffling.
The Shanghai maglev is a great deal of fun to ride (if not very expensive), but it's poorly thought out. Since it's not well connected to the public transit system, it takes longer (and costs more) to get to Pudong International by the train than by a cab.
Of course, I may be especially bitter since the lady at the ticket window lied to me. =) When I got to the maglev station, I realized I hadn't checked if the plane ticket I'd bought in Shanghai was for Pudong or Hongqiao. I know the characters for Pudong, and I couldn't find them on my ticket, so I asked the ticket lady (in Chinese) if the characters for airport were for Pudong. She said yes. I said, *are you sure this ticket is for Pudong Airport?* She said yes. So I bought a ticket, had a fun ride on the maglevl, and promptly missed my flight from Hongqiao.
At 2.2 billion for a short hop, the German maglev seems very overpriced compared with comparable train systems. Linking all the major cities in California on a high speed rail network is only $30B by comparison.
Also, 2.6 billion dollars is only 1.84 billion Euro, and dropping daily. :)
I piss off bigots.
I'm sure it's quieter, faster and probably requires less energy if magnets do not require power. But I always thought it required much more maintenance. However it's difficult to cover the price of such railway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train#Economics there is some prices, for instance for the the Shanghai maglev it will take (9.93*10^9/(7000*50))/365 almost 78 years to cover the cost and it's not including maintenance.
That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The long term cost of a maglev is higher, as they require more power to operate. They're not environmentally friendly, since they use more power, and they require more infrastructure be build in the first place. And that extra speed costs you as well. If you'd like fast service despite the added cost, I'd like to point you to the eurostar, which travels at 200 mph, but is a conventional electric train. There is no good reason to use maglev over conventional tech (except for bragging rights).
...with maglevs (well the current transrapids at least) is that, like all high-speed transport, they are only efficient as hub-to-hub sprinters, as they are relatively slow starters (see here). As the low friction nature of levitation is the reason for their slow launches, I would propose some electrically driven wheels on the undercarriage making contact with the flat concrete track would be able to launch them to top speed (~400km/h or 249m/h) in an unprecedented time
Undercarriage wheels where actually used on some early prototypes to prop them up at rest. They may even be on the current generation IIRC.
If this was done then I think that maglev could be a transport revolution as the first high-speed urban AND interurban transport solution. It truly would be revolution!
In addition, german Maglev technology is rather dangerous; an accident 1 year ago on a demonstration line killed 23 people, this accident was caused by inadequate (by design) signalling system. This is particularly concerning because the first role of railroad signalling is to indicate that the track is free from obstructions ahead so the train may proceed.
By contrast, not a single passenger has been killed in TGV, despite several derailments at high-speed during 26 years of service in Europe.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Actually I was also wrong about quieter, they are not.
I think you'd have trouble paying for any high speed passenger line that only moves 7000 passengers a day.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Maglev's are quieter than conventional rail systems below 100 mph, but above that they get really loud really fast
The siemens build maglev turned out to be quite the white elephant in terms of upfront and operating cost. It's more of a tourist attraction than a means of commute. I was really impressed by it, though.
What if you end up on that train too?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
If it could maintain even 250mph average with stops, it could compete with jets on the 1000-mile market. Remember that this would take you directly into a center city, and also stop along the way. Kind of hard to do that with any conventional jet. You might have NYC to LA with most people going NYC to Chicago, or Salt Lake to LA.
-b.
-b.
http://www.publicpurpose.com/hwy-fy$.htm
Its to the airport so we'll be generous and give it six lanes. 2 lanes for one mile comes to about $540,000 per year (maintenance plus capital costs). Triple that is 1.6 million per year. Times 18 is a hair under $30 million. And we'll give it a useful life of, hmm, call it twenty years before the government decides to vote some lucky contractor more money. Total lifetime cost: $600 million. Double the cost because its Europe and, hey, everyone knows things are more expensive in Europe. $1.2 billion
There, I just saved the German taxpayer $1 billion dollars. The remaining $400 million, my consulting fee, can be sent via the German government's choice of gold bullion or, if about 30 metric tons of gold* seems a little unwieldy, I also take Paypal.
* I'm too lazy to figure out the spot price for gold so I figured on $400 an ounce. So sue me -- I'm a government consultant, you get one Google for your $400 million, the 2nd Google needs a new contract.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I'd certainly prefer it for 1000 mile trips. Heck, even for LA-NY ( assuming Union Station in LA top Grand Central in NYC ) I'd prefer it. I'd rather be comfortable for 12 hours instead of cramped for 5. ( And by the time that one counts delays, baggage check, and getting to and from airports, a flight from LA to NY is a 10-hour affair, doorstep to doorstep. )
Never happen in these United States:
Two very prodominate reasons:
1. It completes with the oil companines/car companies. They will block you with safty ledgslation and lobby you back to the dark ages. ( Note: NO such system has ever been built to full scale. Think about the Oakland Airport to BART? LAX to Downtown or LA to Palm Springs. )
2. The US DOT is NOT interested in small scale systems. They only are interested in trains that can carry 100+ passingers at commute hour. That is THEIR definition of efficency. I would suppose from reviewing both the wikipedia article, the SI article, and the US Dept of commerce, that the system only works in small scale light vehicles. perfect for Airports. Hmm. NO mention of any airports in US adopting them.
That leaves the casinos in NV and Disney. Wait until gasoline is $30/gal, and then you may see some progress.
The gp is in reality a taxi driver in Shanghai ;). I can imagine why he tell us not to take the maglev.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They're wasting 1.85 billion euros to showcase a technology that has no future because conventional trains are safer and much cheaper. The only people that are ever going to want this are governments that try desparately to prove they're on the bleeding edge of technology, like China.
Now, nobody would care if most of the cost was covered by those that stand the most to gain from this: Siemens and ThyssenKrupp. However, most of the cost is paid for by the German taxpayer, a whopping 925 million. Add another 475 million from the state of Bavaria. Siemens and ThyssenKrupp only contribute 50 million to make their big showcase thing a reality. Some here have voiced their suspicion that such a tremendous waste of money could meet resistance, and they're right. Tax payer groups and other organizations and people have fought this for years, and the local government of the city of Munich doesn't want it either.
So why do it? Well, that's easy. It's a memorial of some sort for the Bavarian PM Edmund Stoiber who's baby the Transrapid in Munich project is. He'll be stepping down really soon and he just wants to leave with a bang. And seeing how he's always boasted that Bavaria is by far the most advanced and superior of all German states, economically and technologically, this seems to be the best way to be remembered for him.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Forgot this: Bavarian PM Stoiber and his vision
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Shanghai maglev is great fun, but only for the short haul on an essentially straight line. At peak speed it is really hard to move out of your seat, and a slight twisting of the train can be felt. While the Chi-Coms are considering building longer routes for maglevs, I don't think that's such a good idea, because of this contortioning that happens. Their first application of maglev technology for airport-city transfer is ideal, however, and it's exciting to hear about Munich's project.
-- Jimtown Kelly
What about upgrading existing track to run the German ICE http://www.bahn.de/p/view/international/englisch/trains/trains_ice.shtml (or ICE-T http://www.bahn.de/p/view/international/englisch/trains/trains_icet.shtml) trains? They are fast trains (similar to France's TGV), but not enough high-speed track in Germany to make best use of the train. Surely this would be cheaper?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
What happens if there is an ice buildup along the tracks? On classic railways, the pressure of the train wheels melts the ice... we don't have it in levitating trains. Ice can also build on the sides (where guide magnets reside) and damage train or tracks.
It is a good thing it is the rails that are powered - thus they can (and hopefully do) have some defrost heaters included.
who would have thought that bavarians are actually giant nerds - i mean 2.6billon dollars just to be on slashdot.
Dude, how you manage to type while on acid trip...?
As much I want to like this project to be finished, I believe in it's success only if I see the first needed tunnel or so built. There are several reasons against it:
The Transrapid maglev concept was imagined for longer distances, but then you have other problems: poor freight train capabilities, pressure from both conventional rail-based trains and airplanes, complete incompatibility with conventional rail-based trains.
Why I would like it to succeed: nearly vibration-free and noise-reduced transport, high velocity up to 550km (real world, not the fake TGV-joke, where they changed the motor and electrical circuitry) at lower(!) costs, maintenance-friendly concept (the TCO will be lower compared to rail trains).
if you (a) have a flight at the Pudong airport that day to or from, or if (b) you have a top-up RFID metro card, it's only 40 RMB discount ($5.30ish). Nearly all passengers qualify for one of the discounts.
[pun intentional]
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Maglev's are quieter than conventional rail systems below 100 mph, but above that they get really loud really fast
But not louder than the conventional trains.Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
A maglev traveling at high speeds (say 250 mph) is much louder than conventional rail at less than 200 mph. At the same speed (above 100 mph) they're both comparable in loudness since aerodynamic effects are the driving sources, but since maglev has higher top speeds, they louder at the highest end.
See here and here for more information. Disclaimer: I wasn't a principal author for either of those documents, but I did contribute, and I did attend the maglev testing documented in the first link.
Nowadays it seems like anytime someone proposes an ambitious project inevitably people start complaining about one thing or another, usually money.
This isn't about money, it's about progress. I might agree that it could make more sense to go with a TGV-like system as opposed to Maglev. On the other hand, the only way to refine Maglev technology is to actually use it. Someone needs to be the early adopter.
One thing I always admired about Asia when I was living there was that when they decided they wanted something built they just did it. Not that there sometimes weren't problems, but they did it. They didn't drag their feet, they didn't waste an excessive amount of time on impact studies.
Now being back here in the New York area I find the lack of progress quite depressing. We're stuck riding on an antiquated rail line managed by a corrupt company. This is a company which proudly proclaims that their trains are only 5 minutes late. The times listed on schedules are there only to differentiate the trains, not to actually inform anyone on what time they're supposed to arrive. And that's when a train's contacts dont get snagged on power lines and pull a few down which seems to happen at least once a year.
Politicians around here do nothing but pay lip-service to alleviating traffic problems. But it's not all their fault. We've also got the problem that the rail line is running through one of the most affluent counties in the nation. And those residents will be damned if they see any kind of development that could somehow change their idyllic little world. That's despite the reality that the problems we're having are already adversely affecting them.
So hats off to Germany for being so ambitious. I'd really like to see more of that here.
I thought rails was meant to lower costs .
I'm glad someone pointed that out. The Linimo, not the Shanghai line, was the world's first commercial maglev train, and it very much in operation at this time. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a Slashdot blurb got its facts wrong, though.
(It's a point of pride as well, since I happen to live in Nagoya.)
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
A train that meets an obstacle on track is much better of derailing than staying on track. Derailing means only the first few cars will crash into the obstacle, staying on track means they all jam up.
http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
"The Linimo, not the Shanghai line, was the world's first commercial maglev train"
No, actually, it wasn't.
"The first commercial Maglev was opened in 1984 in Birmingham, England, covering some 600 meters between its airport and railhub"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train
"I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a Slashdot blurb got its facts wrong, though."
I think you should worry about being a submitter who got the facts wrong before you take a shot at Slahsdot.
"Now, contrast this with New York City-- the fact that there's no rail connection between the airports and downtown comes across as pretty ghetto and low-rent."
That's wrong.
"JFK is connected to New York's subway and commuter rail system by the AirTrain. AirTrain stops at all terminals, car rental lots, and two subway stations."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_International_Airport#Rail
Yet another person taking shots at Americans while getting the facts wrong.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
whiter than that. it's enough to consider that munich is home to the headquarters of siemens...
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
A maglev traveling at high speeds (say 250 mph) is much louder than conventional rail at less than 200 mph.
According to your second link, the Transrapid at 250 mph is just as loud as a TGV at 180 mph. That is hardly much louder, is it?Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
That sounds great and all, but having visited Munich last summer, I can say that the existing rail system between the airport and central (old town) Munich is already fantastic.
I guess it could be faster, but in order to do that, you'd have to skip a lot of stops along the way that looked pretty well used to me....
Hrm.
Wouldn't it make more sense to operate the Maglev over a distance which would allow it to save a significant amount of time? i.e. Actually inter city?
In theory, yes. Germany has discussed implementing the "Transrapid" technology somewhere in Germany for decades now. A 20 mile track is way better than nothing, especially if you want to sell it to other countries.
The reason why long distances are no great idea: Germany's topology and population density. Whatever two larger cities you take, there probably are mountains or other things in between which would make the building of the line extremely expensive. Germany's ICEs suffer from the same problem.
France has a high-speed conventional train, the Thalys running between Belgium and Paris and some parts in the Netherlands and bordering West Germany. That area is flat and great for a straight line between two points.
Yep you're correct. I remembered that the TR08 noise vs speed curve sloped up sharply at high freqs, but I thought that the change in slope occurred at a lower speed.