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Magnetic Levitating Trains Get Go-Ahead In Japan
An anonymous reader writes "They've been on the drawing board for 40 years but the politicos have finally approved routes for the 500kph maglev trains to replace bullet trains." I wonder if they'll let me test out maglev rollerblades on the track.
This sort of project makes a lot of sense in a place like Japan where there are a few places with very dense population separated by rural areas.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it will be exponentially more difficult than for us than for a country like Japan, or even most Eastern European countries.
Anyone know how the energy usage per passenger compares with a large jet?
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About seven years ago I would have thought this was the epoch of cool. Now I think it's cool, but not even in the top 100 of cool civics works projects. Once I started riding my bike to work fast doesn't impress me like it once did. On the other hand Copenhagen has redid it's infrastructure to have protected bike lanes all over the city and residential districts are close to work. Now that's cool.
We are the Borg...
except being far apart you have the problem of getting the track actually built. While I don't know much of the Russian frontier, or much of rural US... I know there is a whole LOT of empty land in Canada, rocky, swampy, forest covered nothing. Plowing a train route through the Canadian Shield is not just difficult, in many places it's pretty damn impossible. The hardest rocks in the world cover most of eastern Canada, and despite not being a steep as the Japanese Alps, the sheer hardness of the rocks would make blasting/tunneling prohibitively expensive. On the flip side of that, one would need MASSIVE bridges to cover many of the dips and rivers in Quebec and Ontario.... It is just all around cheaper to fly over it all.
The Tokyo/Nagoya run was likely picked as a first attempt as it is fairly flat and there is an absurd amount of travel between the two centers. At about 20 million people in the greater Tokyo area, and over 8 in the area around Nagoya, these are two of the thee largest cities centers in the country... add the two together and you have almost as many people as there are in ALL of Canada.
They have the demand, money, and geology for it.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Well, looks like Transport Tycoon Deluxe is a few years late in its estimates, strangely. I guess that makes up for SimCity 2000 being (apparently) more than a few years early with microwave power.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
The one from Pu Dong airport in Shanghai has no vibration problems. In fact its super smooth at 430km/h. However, they have used an enormously thick concrete structure to be stiff enough to achieve that.
Great, it finally looks like we might start catching up to where the Japanese were 40 years ago, and now they have to go and make the jump to MagLev.
Yeah, I'm voting for Prop 1A - been following it since '97 or so (the proposition was originally supposed to appear back in 2000 or so, but they keep pushing it back). Expensive, and I doubt it will get the ridership they are projecting until a lot of additional work has gone into local transit in the destination cities, but I'm hopeful that it will kick-start our state and local governments into looking at options besides "build more roads".
... would be only 250 kph with zero wait, nonstop direct. The huge expense (and questionable success... see what happened at ODU) of maglev would not be necessary.
To do that, you have a main line, and then side branches with stations. On the side branches, people get on, and an engineer takes them out onto the main line in front of the train. The trains dock (basically at full speed), and lock together.
Meanwhile, the back unit drops off the back, to proceed to the next station. Trains could go through, basically every half hour, and all rides would be one way, nonstop, direct at 250 kph (150 mph).
When you get on the train, you slide your ticket through a reader, and are instructed which car to proceed to. Additional color coding can also help.
That's for Japan, which would use a basically linear system.
It's slightly more complicated for continental countries, requiring the main trains to travel in circuits -- but basically the same.
With electric propulsion, and today's computers, GPS, and measurement, the system shouldn't be all that difficult.
You end up with less wait than a nonstop flight, much cheaper transport, a lower carbon footprint, and comfortable travel.
Add into that the possibilities for ordering meals and having them delivered piping hot, and it would replace most of your short-hop air travel. Now use the meals to make the tickets significantly cheaper the way Vanderbilt did on his NJ-NYC ferry, and you'd have a huge commercial success.
That's not to say that one wouldn't need to design in certain protections, and that there wouldn't be hurdles to overcome, but the design would far outperform a 500 mph train that travels twice a day, at costs close to that of airfare.
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Wow. I did maglev trains as a science fair project in 1982. I predicted they would reach speeds of 400kph and radically alter the real estate markets.
I almost killed myself making one seriously intense transformer while making a metre long magnet from flat bar and plugging it into the wall. Pop! A 12v car battery was the better solution.
It's about time!
Now, perhaps, but until when? Oil spiked to almost $150 a barrel this year. If it goes up to $150 and STAYS THERE, the airline industry as we know it will simply disappear.
you had damn well better have a VERY effective train system installed BEFORE that happens.
RS
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Is it safe to bring my laptop or any magnetic media storage device?
But... the future refused to change.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it will be exponentially more difficult than for us than for a country like Japan, or even most Eastern European countries.
The 'exponentially more difficult' part is why we shouldn't try to use rail to solve transportation problems. We're just too spread out. Rail only connects a very narrow corridor of people, and moreover, fixes their location indefinitely. If cities re-configure, the rail can't be reconfigured without lots of money.
If, on the other hand, we reconfigured cars so that they were capable of forming dynamic trains, we could get a lot of the benefit of trains without the drawbacks. For instance, trains move lots of vehicles more cheaply than a single vehicle because the locomotive bears the cost of pushing air out of the way. That not inconsiderable expense rises exponentially with speed. In a train, it's spread out over the vehicles following the locomotive but in a car, the single car bears the entire expense.
If cars drafted behind each other, they could share that savings that trains have. For that to work, it would require the cars to be able to communicate between themselves to sort out common destinations and speeds.
In practice, you'd jump on the highway per normal and your car would start querying other cars how far down the road they're going. When it found another car that was headed the same way for more than a mile or so, they'd sort out who would be lead car and who would draft and arrange themselves accordingly. The person in the lead car would continue to drive, but all the cars trailing him would be tucked in within an inch or two of each other. Their car's computers would be telegraphing to each other what the lead car was doing in terms of accelerating/decelerating so that they would do the same at the same time. When someone's destination exit arrived, the car would telegraph to the following cars that it was peeling off and the other cars would momentarily disconnect while the car pulled out of the train and then the remaining cars would re-connect. In the case of the leader, second car up would become the leader. Tail car peeling off wouldn't affect the train at all.
For a car to be allowed to join a train, it would have to carry a digitally signed certificate saying when the last time it was checked out for safety so members of the train would be confident that one of the cars wouldn't fall apart while they're within inches of it and that it was able to stop itself within a standard distance. If you didn't want to join a train, or you joined a train that made you uncomfortable for some reason, you'd turn off the feature and just drive yourself. But if you're a commuter, letting someone else drive the same route day after day, has a lot of appeal. A common commute of 20 miles would give you 20 minutes to yourself to do whatever while someone else drove.
With reaction times removed and cars bunched up within inches of each other, highways can carry more cars at higher speeds. Currently, we slow down when the highways get congested because we have to account for reaction times to propagate down the road. With the cars handling reaction time issues, they can speed up quite a bit.
Add a little intelligence to our cars and suddenly our highways become much greener.
Building a rail system - even one that runs on tracks - is expensive. It only makes sense to build one where it will get used.
A line between Tokyo and Nagoya, the largest and the third largest cities in Japan, will see lots of passengers. The shinkansen line between them gets plenty of use by business travelers just going for the day. A train across the Russian wastelands, not so much.
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"wouldn't that be more useful in places with HUGE distances to trek"
Not really. Airplanes work best over long distances. The reason is the cost of the track.
Trains work best for medium distances. Airplanes don't work well for 200 mile runs because you have to wait so long to board the plane that you might as well drive a car but a train can make stops and then zip back up to high speed and only take five minutes at each stop.
Aren't maglev trains energy inefficient? They have to spend power counteracting gravity, after all. If so, these things wouldn't be practical at all over long distances, and arguably may not be so practical even for Japan.