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Japanese Maglev Train Hits 500kph
An anonymous reader writes Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph. That's well over twice as fast as the fastest U.S. train can manage, and that only manages 240kph on small sections of its route. The Japanese Shinkansen is now running over 7 times times as fast as the average U.S. express passenger train. 500kph is moving towards the average speed of an airliner. Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.
Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph.
Were they volunteers?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
how much does that cost to build?
U.S. express passenger train run over old rails / rail lines.
Not to be "that guy" but I thought airliners cruised about 600ish mph... which is about 1000kph.
It is nice to pick international system units, however it would be better to do it right. This should be km/h, not kph.
there's no way for the train to derail, considering the design (the thing literally runs in a 3 ft deep ditch)
Challenge accepted!
Sure 500kph is a great achievement, but put it in perspective of what places that are interested in rail travel do, don't compare the speeds to the rail backwater that is North America. Normal trains in Europe do 300kph routinely.
The problem with North American rail travel has never been a technology barrier, it's always been about having any interest in doing better.
A train ride from Chicago to Atlanta takes 3 days and goes from Chicago to washington DC and then to atlanta to and costs as much as flying directly there in 2 hours.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.
This one seems REALLY easy to fix. Abolish the TSA, save billions in government expenditure and more billions in lost time and goodwill.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
1/3 of your ticket is paying for the local airports to operate along with the rents they generate and car rental fees. the subsidies are mostly there for out in the boonies airports
Kamikazes Per Hour?
Kardashians Per Hour - (the official business model units of E! Entertainment Television)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Germany has a very well-working system of high-speed trains, named ICE ( InterCity Express ). Most of those average > 300 km/h on stretches between major cities. Stupid Germans ? They overtook the French, with their TGV.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
> it's called "public investment", each person pays a little bit so that everyone can use the thing, think "public roads"
Just at the federal level alone (think just the interstate highways), along with any taxes you're paying, we're incurring $10,000 per person of debt each year. If there are 3 people in your family, that's $30,000 per year your family will have to pay back sooner or later. Right now, we owe $62,000 each ($156,000 per family) .
Is that "each person pays a little" or "each person pays a lot"?
> But, I ask, what is the point of a slow passenger train for commuting?
Two points--
(1) it reduces traffic congestion
(2) it still may be faster than driving.
If everyone who tooks trains into NY drove, we wouldn't have needed a large hadron collider. The Cross Bronx would have collapsed into a black hole.
The problem at this point is building trains, not that trains don't make sense. It's politically sensitive to expropriate property.
will the stupid germans pick up their transrapid stuff where they left it now ?
Actually, the cruel joke here is that the German rail drivers have been striking now. Which is an important lesson . . . if a train *can* go that fast . . . it doesn't mean anything if something else prevents it from doing that.
Also, serious info for serious Slashdotters here . . . the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, has a PhD in Physics. Can any other country boast a top political leader who has a STEM leader . . . ?
She has a tough job . . . a scientist turned politician! But that is the message here . . . it is not about technology, but politics.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What could possess someone to think it's ever valid to compare a maximum to an average?
Compare a maximum to a maximum (500 kph for this Shinkansen vs 241 kph for Acela). Or an average to an average (261 kph for newer Shinkansen vs. 129 kph for Acela). So the difference is only 2:1, and mostly has to do with (1) established rail routes in the U.S. being much, much older so as not conducive to high speed, and (2) travel distances being much greater in the U.S. resulting in air travel being more economical/time-efficient.
that's 81.6 smoots per second. Not that a piece of track anywhere near Boston could support that.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Also, serious info for serious Slashdotters here . . . the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, has a PhD in Physics. Can any other country boast a top political leader who has a STEM leader . . . ?
Not the leader of our government, but my local MP in the England is one of the very few current ones who has a science-related PhD.
Other MPs have openly mocked him in Parliament at various times for doing things like talking intelligently, raising valid concerns about something, or making arguments based on dumb stuff like facts and evidence.
Whether or not anyone agrees with this MP's political views, it's a pretty poor reflection on the calibre of colleagues he has to "debate" with.
She has a tough job . . . a scientist turned politician! But that is the message here . . . it is not about technology, but politics.
Sad, but apparently true.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Can any other country boast a top political leader who has a STEM leader . . . ?
Sure: China. Practically everyone on the top for the last 5 decades was a STEM person.
yeah, it's called "public investment", each person pays a little bit so that everyone can use the thing, think "public roads"
Unfortunately, a real and serious difficulty with high-speed rail is that each person doesn't pay a little bit, they pay a small fortune, while in practice only a relatively small number of people will ever benefit directly from the faster travel times.
It's not a simple thing to consider, because of course others might benefit indirectly.
On the other hand, other others will be worse off. Again, some of this is direct: building the new HS2 high speed line from London up to major cities in the north of England via Birmingham is going to cause a lot of disruption to some people. In some cases, it will wipe out entire small communities, because going around them was deemed too expensive. It's all fun and games until it's your family home or established place of business that gets a Compulsory Purchase Order.
And again, there will be indirect negative consequences as well. For example, building HS2 might actually harm our local economy here in Cambridge, because to some extent there is only finite investment capital to go around, and by not being near the new line, our area becomes a less attractive place to make some of those investments.
But the biggest elephant in the room is the opportunity cost. These kinds of projects commit almost unimaginable amounts of public money -- money collected from a whole generation of taxpayers over several years -- to one single project with limited benefits. You can't just consider high speed rail in isolation. You have to also consider the benefits you don't now receive from, say, upgrading existing rail infrastructure or expanding the road network, both of which potentially reduce journey times significantly for a lot more people and increase freight capacity. And of course taxpayers' money also gets spent in areas outside of transport, like running hospitals and educating kids, where there are always considerable pressures and plenty of ways more money could help. You could even do something crazy like not taking that hard-earned money from taxpayers in the first place and instead letting them spend it on things they valued, thus boosting the economy in whatever areas those happen to be.
Basically, high speed rail sounds great until you check the details, but it is far from being a clear win economically, environmentally or politically when you actually look at the details. Time will tell whether the HS2 project in the UK lives up to the hype, but "it's public investment" is a long way from a robust argument in this particular case. And just about everything here goes double for the very high speed technologies we're talking about in this article.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It really is a matter of infrastructure. When I was living in france, I never drove a car. It was not useful. Driving was typically not much faster than taking the train. I could go to my university in 45 minutes while driving took about 35 minutes. But that gave me the opportunity to read in the train and to take a daily walk.
Later I was studying in Grenoble and my parents were living in Paris. To go and see my parents, public transportation (bus+train_tgv+train_city+bus) was taking about 4 hours and a half, 3 of them were in the "main train" which gave me time to do homework, read a book, whatever. The total cost was under 100 euros round trip. The same trip driving would have taken me 6 hours of actual driving (plus pauses) and cost at least 60 euros of gas.
Now, in the US, it is much more difficult becasue even if you had a good train, there would still be no public infrastructure one you arrive. But I guess you could rent a car.
"If one of these things crashes at full speed, it is unlikely that anyone survives"
Why do you think this?
Crashes at up to 300kph in Japan and France have resulted in 0 fatalities. The worst "high-speed" crash was Eschede with a 50% fatality rate at "only" 200 kph because it went sideways into a bridge piling after derailing onto both sides of the switch and the bridge collapsed on top of it. As sxpert notes, for that to happen with this track design would require also lifting the train several feet to get it out of its trench before you could get it turned far enough to take out a bridge. The proximate failure at Eschede, where snagging the points resulted in the leading and trailing trucks of a car to leave a switch on separate tracks, is physically impossible with this maglev's track design..
It doesn't matter how fast how fast your maglev trains go . . . until this tunnel in Baltimore is replaced, it's impossible for trains in the NE Corridor to run that quickly.
No, they didn't.
There is less space per passenger in a TGV than in an ICE, but the TGV is faster ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... ) and safer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... ).
There are many connections (e.g. Stuttgart München) where ICEs average about 100km/h.
Can any other country boast a top political leader who has a STEM leader . . . ?
Mrs Thatcher had a chemistry degree and before full-time politics she worked in food technology. But the irony was that she came to preside over the destruction of Britain as a leading technical nation. It sems she hated technology.
Psychologically, I have seen this explained as, her having changed careers (science to politics), she was inclined to look back in contempt at her former one. A bit like her having made it into a man's world (as political leadership was back then) she famously looked back in contempt on other women. You can imagine her wanting revenge for having once been the lab junior, making the tea for the others etc, as we all did once.
yeah, it's called "public investment", each person pays a little bit so that everyone can use the thing, think "public roads"
Unfortunately, a real and serious difficulty with high-speed rail is that each person doesn't pay a little bit, they pay a small fortune, while in practice only a relatively small number of people will ever benefit directly from the faster travel times.
And you can say that about road and motorway building too. Living in rural Wales I don't get any direct benefit from new motorways or road widenings in, say the Midlands; nor do most people living in Newcastle or Scotland for that matter. I could even do a reductio ad absurdum of your argument by extending it to say that even if I do use a 3-lane motorway, I get no benefit from the two lanes I am not using. Building HS2 is like having more lanes of motorway.
Whether there is really any benefit in building either motorways or high speed railways is another matter. I have always doubted it. When I see a motorway I am always left wondering how it is that so many people can be in the wrong place and needing to get somewhere else. Usually, when these things are built, people just start travelling longer distances, like my company centralised (closing its regional offices) in the 1980's when a lot of new motorways were completed (the M25 in particular) - explicitly because "travel times were reduced". In fact it took longer to reach most destinations from the central office than it had done from the nearest regional office before they were closed. Staff numbers were not reduced anyway.
Living in rural Wales I don't get any direct benefit from new motorways or road widenings in, say the Midlands; nor do most people living in Newcastle or Scotland for that matter.
That is true, but there is a much higher chance that you will benefit indirectly from improved transport infrastructure that helps anything you buy get moved to your local area so you can buy it. HS2 isn't, as far as I know, currently expected to carry much if any freight itself, and arguments that it will free up significant room on the existing railway network for freight by shifting long-distance services have been criticised for various reasons.
Usually, when these things are built, people just start travelling longer distances
That is certainly true as a local effect and up to a certain level, and it is therefore something that should be taken into consideration when planning whether and where to improve the road network.
In that case there really is a reductio ad absurdum case, though. Suppose you can open up an often overcrowded route such as the M25 enough that all traffic can move twice as fast at busy times. You save a lot of time for a lot of people, and of course you also improve the environmental situation (at least, if you ignore the costs of the development itself and look only at ongoing fuel consumption and emissions by vehicles using the road). Would this mean some people would commute further to work or relocate? Sure. Would it mean everyone using the road would extend their commute or relocate their business to cheaper areas outside London and therefore just shift the burden elsewhere? Of course not. People drive to places for specific reasons, and they choose those places for other specific reasons, and neither those reasons nor economic drivers would completely or even mostly negate the benefits if we could move to some hypothetical road transport network that ran with 100% efficiency tomorrow.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Youre over-generalizing. Japan has a very diverse climate, from subtropical in the south to New-England like winters in the north. Also, the Japanese Shinkansen stops for typhoons, but not wind or rain. For snow you're talking about delays, not stops. Just as long as it takes to clear thr tracks. There's a difference. And while parts of the Great Plains have extreme weather, they also have excellent weather systems already as a result. I don't think there's real need to blame the weather for not developing to system. And it's not always necessary to go at top speed to be fast enough.
(I happen to have lived in Oklahoma for ten years and Japan for twelve).
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
here in America we have a major political party that mocks highly educated politicians as "professorial" or "Not a real/regular American" or "Arrogant know-it-all" among other things.
There might be relatively small numbers of those, but then they interact with others who benefit, and then others interact with those who also benefit, etc. etc. Pretending there's some arbitrary number of separations before it ceases to matter, it's not really helping the discussion. That's not how benefits such as these work.
You can keep your sooth-saying, too, as that's also entirely not helpful to the discussion. Living in continental Europe, your comments about "general reduction in flexibility" and "much higher ticket prices" are laughably nonsensical to me. When prices are higher (which is not always the case when compared to the UK), the service is far better. Flexibility is also insanely present - the system of running inter-town/city trams on surface streets, coupled with high-speed long-distance trains means travel is a breeze, and about as flexible as you can get. No car needed for any part of the journey.