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Transportation Bill Sets Aside $45 Million For MagLev Train
tbischel tips us to news that the MagLev train project which would run from Las Vegas to Disneyland has received approval for $45 million in funding. The project has been in the planning stages for quite some time, and it was delayed further by a drafting error in a 2005 highway bill.
"Derided by critics as pie in the sky, the train would use magnetic levitation technology to carry passengers from Disneyland to Las Vegas in well under two hours, traveling at speeds of up to 300 mph. It would be the first MagLev system in the U.S. The money is the largest cash infusion in the project's nearly 20-year history. It will pay for environmental studies for the first leg of the project."
Trains in the US & A? Can this really be true?
Surely this must involve burning of insane amounts of petroleum somehow! Maybe the magnets are powered by petroleum?
Where critics = oil companies and automobile manufacturers
Just callin' it like I see it.
Well, sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marge_vs._the_Monorail
A huge construction project that would take place in during a recession/depression.. is this going to be this generation's Hoover Dam?
Well, apart from the fact a dam is actually useful, and a train between two holiday resorts during a time when people have no money to spend on holidays is all kinds of pointless.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Start your day shaking hands with Mickey and in under 2 hours you can be getting a blow from Minnie! Woot Woot! Engineering has cum a long way :p
Procrastinators, Unite Tomorrow!!
So a route which was cancelled because of low ridership... is getting the most expensive trainset in the country?
The transrapid project has had a similar length timeframe, and the only feasible implementation (munich to munich airport) was finally shot down a couple of weeks ago. Costs where double of what was originally projected. While maglev is a really cool technology, it is not as brilliant in real life due to the high costs and the competition from airtravel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid
We are all packets in the Internet of life!
And how long did the previous train take. If it took 8 hours, then maybe it's the reason it didn't succeed. That being said, if you're going to build a maglev train, you might as well build it between two major cities, like New York to Washington.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
They shouldn't waste the money to even begin looking at such an idea. Just take a look at the Transrapid project that was recently scrapped in Germany. For roughly 40km of track, linking Munich and the Airport, the final cost projection came out to 3 billion euros ($4.7268 billion)! What a waste.
I think they are more concerned with making it actually profitable.
Invenio via vel creo
From a place where one makes memories with the kids, to a place where one wishes nothing remembered.
Invenio via vel creo
California High-Speed Rail
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
About time the United States became like the other industrialized countries, don't you think?
The French LGV Est is 300 km and cost 4 billion euros - $6 billion. $21 million a mile.
Or if you look at the British London-to-channel-tunnel rail link, it cost £5.2 billion ($10 billion) for 108 km - $100 million a mile.
Even if economies of scale get the price down to $10 million per km the cost will be $4 billion.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
It is not a train.
Its a ride.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There is already a "high speed" train that runs between New York and Washington D.C. - the Acela Express, for a commute time of 2 hours 48 min. It is limited to a paltry 75-150 MPH (120-240 KPH) due to track conditions. Mostly the speed is limited via the existing infrastructure, the bridges, tunnels, track closeness etc. Higher speeds would necessitate reinforcement of those structures, and the overhead electrical wires to withstand higher speeds. Much of the speed inhibition is in that the train needs to tilt to navigate the sharp rail curves. Pre-existing tracks are to close together to allow for high speed cornering that would require the trains to tilt, thus preventing train collisions between regular trains, and the leaning Acela Express. Of note, there are multiple at-grade crossings on this trains route - these are rarely found on other high speed train lines for obvious reasons.
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This is USA, home of AMTRAK. Profitable would be cause for concern. It absolutely must not provide a viable alternative to the current system. BART only runs because it is expensive and impractical. Think of the Oil Companies!
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It would seem that Los Angeles to Las Vegas would be more population centered, thus insuring better profitability.
As far as mag-lev - why? Building a proven TGV type of track, would allow other trains to use it as well, also aiding in cost-benefit. Plan on multiple side junctions to allow the TGV type train to pass the slower trains, thus permitting dual use for freight, etc. I can't imagine the mag-lev train to be that much more efficient, since fuel cost , at those speeds, is all about fighting wind resistance, and not rolling resistance.
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They would make a huge profit from a DC to NY train assuming it had stops in the big East Coast Cities. I grew up in Baltimore and it seems that almost everybody their worked in DC and had to drive all the way everyday. A lot of people would use it for business commutes and many college kids could use it to get home from school (UMD, GW etc) without car.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
What a world we might make then.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
I remember it as an unending procession of nothing, particularly Barstow. ~
Invenio via vel creo
...after having watched part of our antiquated, outmoded, and obviously unused highway system crumble into the Mississippi, I feel that perhaps we should be allocating this money to maintaining the existing infrastructure? Maybe a few of us backward, countryfolk in flyover territory still use these existing carbon-hungry systems? Also, I suffer this delusion that the gas taxes I pay should be channeled not into the general fund, but into transportation projects in my state. If new development is desired, perhaps a few dozen new nuclear plants and an attempt to electrify the vehicle fleet?
The French made their TGV go much faster than 300Mph on normal tracks by basically giving it bigger wheels - 352Mph to be precise.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6521295.stm
Why pay so much for a technology giving you so little? MagLev isn't cheap. You could just copy the French...........ah what am I saying...
throw new NoSignatureException();
I looked into that once. It was much cheaper to drive. Which made me very suspicious about the petro-economics of the whole deal.
The problem is that you have to buy a ticket for you car that's already more expensive than food, fuel, and lodging for the trip. Then you have to also buy a ticket for yourself, which is half again as expensive as the last ticket. Then you still have to take care of your meals.
And it gets much, much worse if you are a group of people.
A family of four would pay almost an order of magnitude less to travel by car.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Trains in the US & A? Can this really be true?
Actually, the bulk of continental freight shipped in the USA is by rail. Have a look at the rolling stock of the likes of Union Pacific, Norfolk Suffolk or CSX, and you'll see that there's been quite a bit going on.
For example, cars are just getting into gas electric hybrids, but the railroads have been running diesel electric hybrids now for decades. The locomotives are now into a new generation of hybrid technology.
The fuel efficiency of these rail lines is staggering. One or two locomotives pull trains that can be two miles long!
But you are preaching to the choir here. I love trains.
This is my sig.
and they run starting around 5:30 AM or so. That's what I used when I lived in BAltimore, and worked in DC
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the French national railway (SNCF) has proven time and time again that electric trains can easily achieve 300mph (a TGV hit 357mph on test in 2007)
That's just 3mph slower than the fastest ever Maglev Monorail.. but it runs on standard gauge rail track that can be time-shared with commuter trains and railfreight traffic.. Heavy Rail in the USA is something that had its time then went away, but don't be surprised if it makes a return again.
300mph trains between city-centre stations can compete with 600mph aeroplanes flying from heavily-secured out-of-town airports.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Let me see if I can convert that to units I can understand [...] how about 0.02 Wars on Terror
In discussions about US government programs I often hear Iraq war comparisons. It's understandable - there are a lot of exciting things we could have done with the $500 billion we've spent in Iraq.
However, we've spent that money; we can't un-spend it. So we don't have $500 billion sitting around waiting for an application. What we have is a toilet that's had $500 billion flushed down it, a budget deficit and $9,410 billion in national debt.
Maybe we never want to pay off that debt; that certainly seems to be the view of our politicians. But if we want to get the national debt under control we have to realise that, to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, ten billion here and ten billion there and pretty soon you're talking about serious money.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I've taken the auto train. It's expensive. Almost all minivans are "oversize vehicles," which cost more. The car carriers are built on a 1970s transportation model where most cars were mid-sized sedans. Amtrak hasn't upgraded it's rolling stock to account for the popularity of the minivans.
... Standard coach fare is $450 plus $514 for the minivan. That's three coach seats - the infant is supposed to be lap-carried. Fat chance of that. Upgrading to the fourth seat for the small monkey brings the fare up to $540+$514 = $1054. Upgrading to the small family bedroom increases the round-trup fare to $2083 total. Tough to justify the Auto Train.
We got a 2-bunk cabin, which is much nicer than trying to sleep in the standard coach seats. Overall costs were about $1600 (in 2003,) not including the additional drive from Sanford FL to Sarasota FL. The main benefit of the auto train is being able to do something else - get up, walk around, sit in the lounge car, have a meal, etc.
However, the economics make this a very expensive trip. Travel time is comparable to driving. In today's costs: our Toyota minivan gets 24 MPG. Round trip is about 1200 miles, using 50 gallons of gasoline. At $4 per gallon, fuel costs are $200. The kids won't sit still for 16-hours of driving, so we split the drive into two days. Hotel costs us $150 or so. If we ate at restaurants for three meals each day, add another $200 in food. So driving costs me about $550, or about 1/3 that of taking the Auto Train. It's less expensive to purchase coach seating on the Auto Train, but that's not really an option if you have small kids.
As a straw-man, I'll check prices for a flight+car from DC to Orlando. AirTran will get me four round-trip flights (2x adult, 2x kids) hopping through Atlanta for $900. Total flight time is about 4 hours. I can rent a mid-sized sedan from multiple vendors for under $300/week.
Hopping over to Amtrak's website
The oil companies are doing better than J.D. Rockefeller's wildest dreams, and we damn sure won't get a working public transit system until the Auto Industry DOES go belly up. At that time, private cars should be outlawed for most of us, in order to make sure that we pay for the system when we DO install it.
It's like the Cold War. We spent many billions of dollars on unusable weapons systems,to keep the bucks flowing between wars, now, when we've managed to get someone to actually attack us, we get to borrow our grand-children's savings so we can buy some real weapons that someone has to go use on someone else. Have you ever noticed how we have to issue bonds whenever our Fearless Leaders find some project actually needed by the public? Just another finger in the pie. Why can't we pay cash, just once?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Your post is sadly accurate. This "venture" does nothing except line more pockets already stuffed with cash.
I would think a better allocation of the money and plans would be building a MagLev from certain rural and suburban communities to the not-close-enough-to-drive-to cities to bolster employment, housing and more. As a for instance, in New York, people and politicians (yes I consider them a separate group) often complain about the decline of Upstate New York. Upstate New York has numerous river towns, all arranged in a nice straight line, all with rail beds or rail in place (yes, I know you cant use existing rail for a MagLev - but you can use existing (defunct or not) areas where that rail did or does exist to put a MagLev in, saving LOTS of money in not needing to grade terrain, remove mountains or hills in the way, etc). So... hundreds of small towns, suburbs and rural areas could be connected to areas like Albany, Troy, Plattsburgh, etc... with travel time from the most remote being in the matter of minutes instead of hours by car or regular rail.
What a neat way of building up the area... really short commute to work/the "big" cities, really cheap and affordable housing, lots of land to build more on... which, in the not-too-long run would be what happens as each area becomes more and more self sustaining, both through an influx of new people looking for affordable housing close (time wise at least) to available jobs - and through having financial ties back and forth between the cities and the growing rural and suburban areas (a financial benefit to all involved - and also an incentive for more businesses to move into the cheaper upstate area to help continue that growth).
Nah... that would help too many people - both those who live up there, and those who live in less affordable areas who would consider moving there to have a decent lifestyle, home and job.
Much better to line the pockets of the already insanely rich.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Los Angeles and Las Vegas are pretty-damn-big cities. What's more, the traffic traveling between the two on a regular basis is enormous, and the length of the route in addition to the congestion means getting people out of their cars could be a HUGE win.
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