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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.
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.
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
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.
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?"
It has a top speed of 280mph in regular service with passengers.
The TGV on steel rails does 200mph in regular service, and it made a record run of over 300mph, but mechanical wear would probably be too high to go that fast in regular service.
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.
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.
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 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.
...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!
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.
Have you been to Germany? Traveled through the country and taken a few train trips? With those taxes comes some of the nicest, most efficiently-running, most well-maintained infrastructure in Europe. It's worth the money in the sense that, to Germans, it ensure that the country has an amenity that keeps their country running in a lifestyle to which they're accustomed.
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.
It's a lot like the difference between renting and apartment and owning a house. Renters are understanding that the kitchens and bathrooms are going to be old and not well maintained, because the landlord isn't willing to invest in upgrades if it doesn't give him more rent. On the other hand, people who own their house are going to put money into their homes to upgrade their kitchens and buy nice furniture because they enjoy the lifestyle it provides.
Germans expect to live in a country where they have the amenities they would expect as owners. Americans are content to have their government act as a slumlord.
The TGV is an articulated trainset, whereas the ICE is a conventional separable coach trains. The TGV has extreme longitudinal safety (the cars cannot separate) whereas the ICE cars are easily separated during an accident (whenever the TGV derailed at speed, no cars separated)
In addition, the resilient wheel technology used by the ICE was disastrous, as it was the prime cause of the wreck at Eschede.
The 360 mph run was not publicity, but a demonstration to drive the final nail in the maglev coffin. Maglev is a financial disaster, a boondoggle that leads nowhere. The message is: had the money wasted in maglev projects put towards conventional rail transit, there would be far more high speed lines in service. The ICE was not "new technology". So isn't the TGV. Both are ordinary trains souped-up to operate faster when faster-designed tracks are available (both run at "normal" speeds when running on "normal" tracks). But yes, the "new" technology on the ICE, the resilient wheel (which, as a matter of fact, was invented in the 1930's to equip PCC streetcars), proved to be it's undoing, and those wheels were not designed into the ICE because of the need for speed, but simply to offer a quieter ride.You shouldn't have to worry about your credit card getting wiped unless you're riding under the tracks where the high powered magnets are, and if you're down there, you probably have bigger problems than having to get a new credit card
Conventional rail has been developped over the last two centuries, and thus has 200 years of engineering experience. Any self-respecting low-level railroader can tell blindfolded in his sleep what arrangement is safe or not.
Maglev has no such lengthy experience. Maglev is radically different technology, and the safe practices and design have to be determined from scratch.
Only the TGV and the Shinkansen have the number of passenger/miles AT HIGH-SPEED to give it sufficient experience.
The only good and bad luck was because of the design. The articulated trainset is an inherent safety feature which neatly paid-off. And the resilient wheel was a fatal feature. Engineers willingly chose to design an articulated train on one side, and to give it resilient wheels on the other. There is no luck in that, only calculation that, alas, proved to be faulty in the case of the ICE.
Never say never. Back in 1955, trains were experimentally run as fast as 206 mph. It took almost 50 years for this speed to be attained in normal commercial service. Never say that there will not be 400 mph TGVs within the next 50 years.
The investment is much smaller than comparable investment in roadways or airlines for the same transport capacity.
Maglev will always be more expensive than maglev for the only reason that maglev is not compatible with the existing rail network.
So, instead of riding on existing lines to go downtown, you will either have to very expensively build new lines to reach the downtown station, or have to stay on the outskirt of the city, much like the airports of today. And everywhere you want to go with a maglev, you have to build a line. Not so with a TGV that can go anywhere a train can go.
The cost is never going to go down.
In order to be profitable, a rail network needs flexibility. One important factor for flexibility is the ability to switch tracks. Not just to get to a particular track in a station, but to go around other traffic.
In order to do this, you need track switches. The more switches in your network, the more flexible it is.
Maglev networks will never be as efficient or flexible as conventional rail networks because maglev switches are so cumbersome that putting as many switches on a maglev as there are on regular rail networks will be prohibitive.
The reason is that a maglev switch has to replace a straight sect
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
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck