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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."
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.
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
It is far more likely that if such a system gets built, it will be General Atomics. GA's is not only American, but it is a fraction of the price/mile. Of course, it is not as fast. The transrapid does 300 MPH+, whereas the GA will be 250. But the GA is expected to cost about the same as a monorail (5-10 million/mile), whereas transrapid cost 30 million/mile just in china.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train
I hope the German one turns out to be more technically reliable.
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.
...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.
"Edmund"? Edmund Blackadder? He could certainly be deceitful, sure, but it's a rather obscure link between he, Machiavelli, Mussolini, Hilter, *then* Germany. I'm not sure many folk will "get it".
I don't know about Germany, but apparently it costs (look at "Interstate 287" costs) around $100 million per mile (estimated) for a six lane (three lanes each way) toll road on Long Island, New York (bridges cost a lot extra). This is comparable in cost to the maglev rail in Munich right down to the property costs, I wager.. Ridership on the German train is expected to be almost 8 million while the six lane road is expected to take 27 million vehicles. Hmmm, I didn't expect the rail to look so poor in comparison. Especially given that the highway takes about 20% busses and cargo trucks while the maglev only takes passengers. And given that this hypothetical road is a toll road, then the road probably pays for itself as well.
This is a problem even with regular trains -- people have either tried to steal overhead wires, or, in one case in my town, some kids tried to touch them with a stick on a dare. Let's say that 25,000V at hundreds of amps is nothing to joke with.
I'm living in Munich. I don't know a single person who's in favor of the Transrapid. I'd love to know one, because I haven't ever heard a convincing argument in favor of this connection.
There are essentially two arguments in favor of the Transrapid:
1) it will make all the world want to buy this fancy German technology, as it will show everybody how viable and useful it is.
2) it will make the ride to the airport much faster, as the ride from the central station will become much faster.
Re 1): that's fairly hypothetical, and I don't buy it. People havent's started wanting the Transrapid after the one in Shanghai turned out a success. Also several other tracks in Germany were deemed not worth doing. Why would that be different elsewhere.
Re 2): Using the transrapid will first mean getting to the transrapid. That means getting to the central station, and from there getting to this new track, which certainly means a walk of several minutes, as it won't be one of the existing tracks. Now if you're living in the north of Munich, there's no need to go to the central station to get to the airport, as the current train stops in the north of munich. If you're living in Munich's east or west, there's no need to go to the central station, as the current train lines stop in the east (Ostbahnhof) and west (Pasing), respectively. Only if you live in the south, you may benefit from from this faster connection. If you're coming from outside Munich, your train will stop in Pasing, where you can change to the current airport train, saving you the ten minutes it takes to get from Pasing to the central station, and therefore the transrapid.
In other words, the speed benefit from building the transrapid affects only a small percentage of the people wanting to get to the airport. If they built the suggested express train alternative (i.e. a train that only stops in Pasing and in the places where the track connects to the subway), there would be no gain left, unless your trip starts from the central station.
The transrapid is Edmund Stoiber's gift to himself before retiring from his job as Bavarian prime minister. It doesn't make sense.
You answered your own question. It's not sexy. Maglev is sexy. This is truly a real-life version of Monorail. No one but Stoiber and his little group of cronies wants it built. The track costs are enormous, the route will require no fewer than three more tunnels and two bridges (or bridge extensions), there are some difficult easements to obtain along the route, the energy usage is extreme, ugly noise abatement walls will have to be built, annual track maintenance is more than double the standard rail tracks which the S-Bahn uses, and all of this for what? To shave a maximum of half an hour off the trip between the airport and the train station.
Except no one will ride it. Most travelers aren't going to Hauptbahnhof. They're headed to Ostbahnhof, Marienplatz or Pasing. Once they arrive at the Hauptbahnhof they then have to transfer to the S-Bahn anyway. Not that anyone will ride the thing to begin with. The costs are so high that the ticket prices will be at least three times that of the normal S-Bahn. No local is about to shell out for that and neither would most of the foreigners.
An express S-Bahn in conjunction with the existing S-8 route could be done with only one additional track, but even with a dual track would be a much better solution. The time could be cut from 60 minutes to 40, only 10 minutes slower than the expected maglev time at a cost savings of a few billion plus more than 120 million annually in track maintenance, a recurring cost which will also continue to rise.
Anyone who believes the costs will actually stay anywhere near 2.6B is on drugs. This white elephant will end up costing us more than 5B. But it's sexy.
I want to know just how much of a vested interest in the suppliers, operators and landowners those who have pushed this project have. Maybe we can have another neat scandal.
"Except no one will ride it."
I would. you might be right that it wouldn't be popular among the normal commuters (not at 3x the normal price, anyway), but I've never been an a maglev, and would like to try it once.
So...maybe you should see it as a touristic attraction.
Ofcourse, you're probably right with the rest of your analysis. And indeed, it will probably cost 5 billion, if they predict 2.6 - those over-budget things happen a lot, with huge projects.
That said, a small remark, though. When I see the argument 'current TGV trains can go almost as fast as maglevs, for far less money'...well, true, in a way. But that's NOW, and that's when our current state of investment is pretty low, just because of the arguments you brought up. But, the old trainsystem can only be optimized in a relatively small way anymore: it's more of a technical 'polishing' and optimizing...but at the end, no drastic improvements are possible, because it's a fully matured technology.
When the jet-engine for airplanes was first build, they weren't all that faster then the old, matured and optimized classical engines neither. And they were costing a lot more, and were (are) more expensive in maintainance. If people then would have said; well, just let us continue the old way and optimize our current engines a bit further, the technology for the jet engine wouldn't be where it is today. It has proven to be a superior product in many respects by now. Maybe the same can be said of the maglev-development. Sure, it's more expensive to buy and to maintain, and it's currently not all that much faster than an ordinary high-speed train - but it's a NEW technology. That doesn't just mean it's more 'sexy', it also means it's at the beginning of its potential, not at the end, like our current, matured train-technologies.
It's often worth to give a novel technology a shot, even, certainly in the beginning, it doesn't seem all that better and is often more expensive. Fighting against an established market/technology can be very difficult, but it can have its advantages in the long term too.
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