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Maglev Train Exceeds 600km/h For World Record
nojayuk writes: An experimental Japanese magnetic levitation train has reached a speed of 603 km/h, breaking the world speed record the same train set last week of 590 km/h. "Central Japan Railway (JR Central), which owns the trains, wants to introduce the service between Tokyo and the central city of Nagoya by 2027.
The 280km journey would take only about 40 minutes, less than half the current time. However, passengers will not get to experience the maglev's record-breaking speeds because the company said its trains will operate at a maximum of 505km/h. In comparison, the fastest operating speed of a Japanese shinkansen, or "bullet train" is is 320km/h. ... Construction costs are estimated at nearly $100bn (£67bn) just for the stretch to Nagoya, with more than 80% of the route expected to go through costly tunnels, AFP news agency reports."
For 5% of the fuel cost? And no security theater? And no $100 taxi ride either way? I'll take it.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Not if you count the time getting through security. For me, this is one of the biggest comforts of riding a train. I use it for short city to city trips. Show up 20 minutes before scheduled departure to make sure you aren't late, walk on, walk off. Most train stations are in the middle of the city while airports tend to be on the edge of the city, which, depending on where you are going, can often add even more travel time to travelling by air. Also, sometimes minimal travel time isn't the biggest concern.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Fukishima Water Pumping Plant - bonus you don't need to waste electricity on lights.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Obviously their real goal was to exceed 1 megafurlong per fornight (598.7 km/h).
So, less than one Iraq War then?
Sounds pretty good.
If you're putting 80% through tunnels, I'd wonder if it would almost make sense to make it 100% tunnels and have it in a vacuum. You could reach absurd speeds with such a design, though only if your stops are sufficiently distant (you would want a hub/spoke model).
that's $2 TRILLION for NYC to LA if you extrapolate the costs. and it would still be half the speed of your average airliner
Only if the entire distance is a mountain chain and 600km/h is 3/4 of the speed of a modern airliner (not average, any).
Definitely true. Not a problem to be ignored.
On the other hand, Japan has some of the best public infrastructure in the world. I wonder what the US infrastructure would look like if it could divert 50% of the military spending to infrastructure.
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Japan tends to be more sane about this sort of thing. Heck, they had someone nerve-gas their subway, but it's still the same as before. Here in the USA we'd have politicians demanding mandatory strip-searches on anyone trying to use mass transit faster than you can say TSA.
600km/h is 3/4 of the speed of a modern airliner (
No, it's 2/3rds, Boeing 777 cruise speed is 905km/h, 747-400, 787, and A380 are slightly faster, A340 is slightly slower.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
For one, it's an investment in technology. Being a leader in high-tech stuff has lots of advantages, such as selling to other countries that want to build the same thing. It makes a lot more sense than, say, the money that the USA wasted in the Middle Eastern wars over the past decade or so.
600km/h is 3/4 of the speed of a modern airliner (
No, it's 2/3rds, Boeing 777 cruise speed is 905km/h, 747-400, 787, and A380 are slightly faster, A340 is slightly slower.
Well, depends on whether the airline is in the jet stream or not. Anyway, it is certainly not half, 1200km/h is faster than the speed of sound.
Trains don't have security theater yet because of the lower perceived potential impact - you can't crash a train into something, for example. This is, of course, an display of lack of imagination. Living near NYC, I am all too familiar with a multitude of bridge and tunnel crossings. Damaging a train - even a local subway train, not a commuter or long-distance route - in the middle of any one of those would cause serious headaches, if not major consequential damage. The real point is that an ultra-speed line operating the Boston-NYC-Washington corridor, or any other section of the major city routes, would become a much more attractive target because of (1) its very newness and shiny-ness, and (2) the higher possibility of doing consequential damage by damaging a train at higher speed. One must assume, then, that some degree of security theater will be imposed on the new rail system.
One must also assume that since the new tracks will have to be totally new, they will have an excuse not to follow existing tracks into the old center city stations along highly expensive rights-of-way, but will instead stop at new stations outside of cities . . . maybe at airports, to take advantage of at least *some* infrastructure. This would be OK if there were better local connections, except in the US many airports have no connections to their cities; the three New York City area airports, for example, despite being in one of the best mass transit centers in the country, were never fully connected to the existing local commuter train lines. And bus service is laughable.
That assumes the entire cost scales equally, but I suspect the major cost is the development of the technology and the building of the train itself, the track and associated infrastructure is probably a lot less. I expect adding further track/destinations/etc, such as a line from Nagoya to Osaka, would be a lot less expensive.
Something like this would be amazing to have in the Northeast Corridor - heck, we're spending $117 billion just to increase the speed there to 350km/h. At 500km/h it would take an hour to get to New York, which would be just as fast as flying, without the insanity and the hassle.
JR will finance this through earnings from their Shinkansen lines.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Trains don't have security because it would be trivial to attack them without being on them. Short of acquiring a fighter jet or missile, this is not the case with aircraft. Why bother blowing yourself up on a train when you can do whatever you want to it from anywhere along it's permanent track? Dumbasses demonstrate this tactic all the time by stopping on grade crossings.
As for the NYC airports, only Laguardia is isolated from rail. JFK is linked to Jamaica, which is served by both subway and LIRR. Newark is served by Amtrak and NJ Transit along the NE Corridor line.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
could be a bit of a 'make work' program or to maintain the ability for Japanese companies to complete projects like this?
Sure they spend 100B, but as a form of welfare or pork barrel spending, it sure beats smart bombs and cruise missiles right?
on a trip to Italy, from Rome to Naples (same distance as DC to Philadelphia). It took 1:10 from city center to city center, at a top speed of 295km/h. Amtrak's best trip over the same distance takes 1:40 and costs literally 4-8 times as much. There was no security theater - you could arrive two minutes before departure and run onto the platform and make the train. The seats were comfortable and roomy, and there was free wifi and charging stations at every seat.
I really don't see how anyone could choose driving/flight over this for short-to-medium range intercity trips. Unfortunately it looks like the US will never get a real high speed rail system, because the Republicans think all trains are an evil communist plot, while the Democrats insist on sending every infrastructure project to 10 years of environmental review dependency hell. Meanwhile every other developed country continues to overtake us in quality of life.
Also, Japan is the world leader in high speed rail. They can sell the technology all around the world. The UK's current high-ish speed rail is going to use Japanese trains, for example.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's worth noting that this is just the starting speed. The train, the Type L0, is supposed to run up to around 900km/h after some time. They are taking it slowly in order to maintain a high level of safety, slowly increasing speeds over a number of years. The other big concern is noise, particularly from exiting tunnels, but hopefully that can be solved.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Live in NYC, and just got back from Tokyo.
The train system in the Northeast is a joke compared to anywhere in Europe and a hilarious joke compared to Japan.
The number of people traveling on all US flights in total is about 1.75 million daily. By contrast, the Tokyo subway system alone carries over 8 million passengers daily, while the greater Tokyo railway system carries 40 million passengers every day, using nearly 900 stations to embark and disembark. The simple fact is that there's no practical way to do any sort of security screening for mass transit on that scale anyhow, even had they wished to.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Not just city to city, but city center to city center. I can't tell you how frustrated I get when I take a 1.5 hour flight that requires 1.5 hours to get to the departure airport and 1.5 hours to get from the arrival airport to downtown.
Plus, on a train I don't feel like I'm being jammed into a can with a bunch of smelly sardines. Headroom is such a pleasure on a 4 hour trip. And any trip up to 4-5 hours is just as fast or faster done on a train.
Full disclosure: I grew up in a railroad family. My grandfather was an engineer and fireman (that's what they called the guys who originally shoveled coal into the boilers on the steam trains and then kept the diesel engines running, later) for the Rock Island and my dad was a machinist for the R.R. I have a full set of china from the dining car of the Golden Rocket and I'm drinking out of a heavy china mug from the original Golden Chief. I dig the railroad. My wife and I took our honeymoon on the trans-Canadian railroad in a luxurious railway cabin, and when you've had sex in a gently rocking sleeping car, the "mile-high club" doesn't really seem all that impressive.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Less than one month of the Iraq War.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In Japan the Shinkansen stations are connected to or part of a larger general network station.
Actually no. Many shinkansen stations are adjacent to mainline railway stations in Japan but not all of them. Shinkansens run on their own separate railtracks on a separate network to the mainline trains. They have to, they're standard gauge (4ft 8 1/2 inches) whereas Japan's regular rail network is nearly all a smaller gauge, 3ft 6 inches.
Shinkansen stations such as Shin-Onomichi and Shin-Karashiki serve smaller cities and are some distance from the town centres and their regular railway stations as it would have been inconvenient to route the shinkansen track into those city centres.
Remember, there are only two tunnels, and they're over 100 years old, and one of them got flooded with salt water during Hurricane Sandy, and people are already talking about how to shut them down for refurbishing. Besides, I figure explosion in the tunnels is a much better engineering bet than in the open on a bridge; there's got to be some bonus for the confined space. How about smashing a window and triggering the explosive between the train and the tunnel wall if there's enough clearance? Though obviously the preferred direction is "up", because that's where the water is, which is much more interesting than just blocking and damaging the tracks and tunnel and wiring and electrification . . . Ooh, right, gotta get that 480 volts involved somehow.
Civilization only works because most people, most of the time, are civilized. And that's even counting the people stealing cables and pipes out of the walls for the scrap metal. Most people don't see any profit for themselves in random destruction, beyond maybe the immediate lulz. But in the never-ending battle between order and chaos, chaos has by far the easier victory conditions.
- Is holding the world record of 574,8 km/h on conventioanl rail since 2007.
- Is linking all major cities in France and some abroad (Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, UK).
- Has commercial speeds of 280km/h for the oldest ones, to 320km/h for the current generation.
- Costs a fraction of the price of the maglev.
But, YMMV. And by all means go Japan !