kevin_standlee (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kevin_standlee) wrote2007-09-25 11:54 am
kevin_standlee) wrote2007-09-25 11:54 am
Maglev Maniacs
Cheryl passes on to me this story about Bavaria building a maglev link to their airport. Upon first reading, you might think I'd say "Great! Another high speed train! Trains are great!" But in fact, I think this one is a really stupid idea, just like the Shanghai maglev referenced in the article. (The CEO of my company has been on that Shanghai system; he was telling me about it a while back when I happened to be seated with him at the Company Christmas lunch.)
I'm lukewarm about maglev systems in all cases, because they can't share existing railway infrastructure. This means you can't build a high-speed line that shares the legacy tracks into existing stations, which significantly increases the cost of construction. Also, thanks to imovements in conventional railway technology, maglev is not really that much faster than existing steel-on-steel high-speed systems. The new TGV line will run at up to 350 kph in opearation, and came close to beating the maglev speed record in a test run earlier this year.
In any event, if you insist on building maglev systems, then why build a system where the stops are so close together that you never get a decent benefit out of it? Maglev speeds are so high that you should be thinking of stops hundreds of kilometers apart, not dozens like an airport-to-city-center line. Although I still think it's a dumb idea, a maglev between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is (ahem) on the right track, distance-wise.
Munich would be better served by a more conventional railway link between airport and city center, running on relatively short headways at fast, but not necessarily hyper-fast speeds.
I'm lukewarm about maglev systems in all cases, because they can't share existing railway infrastructure. This means you can't build a high-speed line that shares the legacy tracks into existing stations, which significantly increases the cost of construction. Also, thanks to imovements in conventional railway technology, maglev is not really that much faster than existing steel-on-steel high-speed systems. The new TGV line will run at up to 350 kph in opearation, and came close to beating the maglev speed record in a test run earlier this year.
In any event, if you insist on building maglev systems, then why build a system where the stops are so close together that you never get a decent benefit out of it? Maglev speeds are so high that you should be thinking of stops hundreds of kilometers apart, not dozens like an airport-to-city-center line. Although I still think it's a dumb idea, a maglev between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is (ahem) on the right track, distance-wise.
Munich would be better served by a more conventional railway link between airport and city center, running on relatively short headways at fast, but not necessarily hyper-fast speeds.
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Building these projects, though, particularly in rail-friendly territory, will either result in more interest and innovation in maglev, or will clearly show it as a momentary curiosity. Better there than here, where guaranteed failure would just help people write off rail in general.
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I think it's the perfect example.
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But yeah, the point would mostly be ultra-high speed I thought, so it makes no sense at all on a short run (except as technology test to see how it holds up to the real world of course).
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Generally though, I think you're right.
There are lots of routes in the US where high speed rail makes so much sense that it's astounding they've not done it. Especially up and down the coasts and around, say, DC, Chicago, NYC and Boston.
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As far as I can tell, the top people in the US government have never seen any political hay to be made from high-speed rail. Airlines and freeways are more interesting to them. Few of the key decision-makers have ever even been on a train themselves, I bet. And the airlines work very dilligently to squash high-speed initiatives that might interfere with them. I reckon Southwest Airlines will throw a lot of money at killing the California High Speed Rail bond if it ever manages to make it to the ballot, for instance.
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Winchester-Waterloo-tube-Paddington-Heathrow Express is a little bit too painful for me.
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When will you be running on a ticket I can vote for?
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The problem with that is, well, where to put it? There are currently two S-Bahn lines connecting the airport with the city - one east-ish and one west-ish, and you'd probably have to sacrifice one of them to run fast trains through on them. This would, naturally, annoy the residents of one half of the city. The obvious "straight line" route is occupied by a river!
The maglev route (http://www.magnetbahn-bayern.de/projekt_magnetbahn_bayern.html) starts off following the S-Bahn, but not for far. The rest of the route follows a major highway - again, not somewhere you can put a train line - before going underground (which any new link of any sort would have to do).
The cost estimates are €27 million per kilometre for the maglev, as opposed to €34 million, per kilometre which is what the last German fast rail project cost.
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Maglev speeds
Problem is air resistance goes up as the cube of the speed; aerodynamics only get you so far and getting large objects to go at airliner speeds at ground level through 1atm of air pressure requires massive amounts of energy, and existing fast trains are running into the problems of steel-wheel-on-steel-rail wear (think of multi-tonne hammer impacts on the rail from each wheel as the train passes over it) and catenary power delivery, both of which are severely exacerbated by high-speed running. The catenary wire has to deliver more power in a shorter period of time through the same-sized contact patch on the pantograph bar resulting in exagerated abrasive wear as well as spark erosion and (worst-case) melting. Maglev power is delivered through hot-shoe systems typically which have a greater contact patch area and less problems in power densities and wear.
Maglev is newer than steel-wheel-on-steel-rail and can still even in its current primitive forms outperform its wheeled ancestor speedwise. It's a bit like the first jet engines, crude though they were, which still produced power and performance matching the best piston engine designs of the day. It was obvious to a few visionaries (Sir Henry Royce among others) that they were the future of aero engines.
To get a speed increase out of the current in-service fast trains like the TGV and the shinkansens it may well be necessary to go to running in evacuated tubes to get rid of the air resistance problem, at which point 1000kph and higher will be a real possibility (LA to LV in an hour?).
Re: Maglev speeds
When we see room-temp supercondutors and commerically-viable fusion, I reckon maglev (and the power it will demand) will be really viable, because those two will tend to overwhelm the negatives on an overall equation. As it stands, color me skeptical of ignoring the entire legacy infrastructure. It's like saying we have a nifty new automobile that runs on water and goes 200 mph, but you'll have to build an entire separate road system for it that can't work with anything you've ever built before.
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