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  • MAGLEV Munich (Muenchen) Germany Project Kaput.

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MAGLEV Munich (Muenchen) Germany Project Kaput.

General discussion of passenger rail systems not otherwise covered in the specific forums in this category, including high speed rail.

Moderators: mtuandrew, gprimr1

  by 3rdrail
 
This technology may very likely turn into the most efficient short of the vacuum of space, once perfected. Friction is the enemy of efficiency, and this method may show itself to ultimately be incredibly cheap to run after the infra structure is in place.

  by RVRR 15
 
3rdrail wrote:Friction is the enemy of efficiency
Without friction, how can things come to a stop? Friction creates heat, which is (theoretically) waste energy. However, without friction, you cannot push against the surface of the Earth and get moving, never mind stopping.
VikingNik wrote:A 220 mph train using technologies that exist today and not 50 years from now could get you across country in less than 20 hours
You're holding the train down to an average speed of 142 mph. A top speed of 220 mph allows average speeds far faster than that.

  by 3rdrail
 
RVRR 15 wrote:
3rdrail wrote:Friction is the enemy of efficiency
Without friction, how can things come to a stop? Friction creates heat, which is (theoretically) waste energy. However, without friction, you cannot push against the surface of the Earth and get moving, never mind stopping.
Do you constantly and simultaneously apply your accelerator and brake while operating your automobile ?

Transrapid partners to decide this week to dissolve firm

  by DutchRailnut
 
Transrapid partners to decide this week to dissolve firm - report
FRANKFURT (Thomson Financial) - The Transrapid consortium partners are expected to decide this week to dissolve the company after Munich opted not to build the magnetic levitation railway in the city, Die Welt said, citing sources.

It said a supervisory board meeting of Transrapid on Wednesday will formally decide to dissolve the company. Representatives of the shareholder companies Siemens AG. and ThyssenKrupp AG. will be at the meeting.

The two companies are the main partners in Transrapid.

[email protected] mog/sal

  by VikingNik
 
RVRR 15,

Yes, I realize that I am holding down the average speed quite a bit, but the way I look at it, you are never going to fund or find a train that travels 2000+ miles at 220+ mph top speed without any stops along the way. I am allowing for connections and/or stops at various big cities along the way and probably having to deal to some degree with legacy curvy train routes within these cities, with a hypothetical cross country route likely going through (from NYC) Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago (likely switching trains here), St. Louis, KC, Denver (maybe switching here), Santa Fe, Phoenix, then down to LA. With enough frequencies and proper scheduling of connecting trains, 20 hours should be more than reasonable.

  by 3rdrail
 
The 20th International Conference of Magnetically Levitated Systems and Linear Drives called "MAGLEV 2008" is to be held in....San Diego, California, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA from December 15 through 18th, 2008 ! :-D

  by RVRR 15
 
3rdrail wrote:
RVRR 15 wrote:
3rdrail wrote:Friction is the enemy of efficiency
Without friction, how can things come to a stop? Friction creates heat, which is (theoretically) waste energy. However, without friction, you cannot push against the surface of the Earth and get moving, never mind stopping.
Do you constantly and simultaneously apply your accelerator and brake while operating your automobile?
Care to explain that nonsequitur?

Whatever you mean, I will say this: that without friction, my wheels would be spinning in place every time I hit the accelerator. This happened to me last winter; I couldn't get the sand underneath the tires fast enough to induce friction. (The physics equation Fmax = μsN is quite useful for such situations.)
VikingNik wrote:the way I look at it, you are never going to fund or find a train that travels 2000+ miles at 220+ mph top speed without any stops along the way
Why not? (never mind the fact that nobody's funding such trains for any distance in this country) BTW, where are you getting "above 220 mph" from, when 217 mph is the current ceiling for conventional rail?

15 hours should be feasible, with one stop and one crew change. Multiple stops are not necessary, nor is changing trains in the middle of the country.

  by 3rdrail
 
RVRR 15 wrote:
3rdrail wrote:
RVRR 15 wrote:
3rdrail wrote:Friction is the enemy of efficiency
Without friction, how can things come to a stop? Friction creates heat, which is (theoretically) waste energy. However, without friction, you cannot push against the surface of the Earth and get moving, never mind stopping.
Do you constantly and simultaneously apply your accelerator and brake while operating your automobile?
Care to explain that nonsequitur?
No nonsequitur here, my friend. My accelerator/braking question formed a logical premise beginning to end, and in fact is physically demonstratable, as shown when I have used the process in the reconstruction of serious motor vehicle collisions. (If anything, the use of "constantly" and "simultaneously" was redundant.) The point that I was trying to make is a simple one. My point is that a vehicle loses efficiency where non-useful, wasted friction (energy) is applied. Referencing your original question, the key to an efficiently operating drive system on any vehicle is the correct and measured quotient of friction applied as needed, to propel, guide, and slow/stop such a vehicle. When operating at "cruising speed", a vacuum tube Mag-lev could potentially be run with a minimum of friction, ie. run with maximum efficiency. That is why the vacuum tube Mag Lev has the potential, as laboratory experimentation has shown, to exceed current known maximum speeds of vehicles on, under, and over the face of the Earth within our atmosphere.

  by VikingNik
 
Because if you want federal funding it will be very difficult if lots of trains just blow through your cities or countryside without stopping anywhere near you. It is easy for airlines to get away with it (Coast to coast flights are routinely 50% cheaper than flights to Dallas, etc... for me. $189 to LA from DC, $600 to Oklahoma City on a recent search) because they are just specks 7 miles up. A nationwide HSR network won't exist for 20 years at the barest minimum so there is perhaps a possibility that technology would improve in the meantime to get us to 220+ from a 'max' of 217 today. It would be ridiculously expensive to build a system that doesn't connect the obvious cities in a row. I have found one good use to USA Today and that is the weather map. It serves as the basis for theoretical HSR networks using the fewest lines possible to serve the greatest interconnectivity. Try it. It is fun.

  by 3rdrail
 
VikingNik wrote:Because if you want federal funding it will be very difficult if lots of trains just blow through your cities or countryside without stopping anywhere near you.
(1) Not if it's part of a National evacuation plan to relocate quickly from one coast to the other, and;

(2) It defeats the purpose of the super-sonic Maglev to be making "commuter-train-like" stops, as the acceleration and deceleration detracts from overall speed, efficiency, cost, time, and maintenance. Better to have one stop mid-point with two terminals (with facilities built in such as large medical facilities en route which would not be customary stops).

I would even argue for that mid-point stop to be in the middle of "nowhere" in a corn field somewhere, so as to encourage the development of a new city where there isn't one, as well as all the new jobs, residences, etc. that would accompany such a new construction. A straight-line route from coast to coast with the mid-point chosen on that axis would be ideal.

  by DutchRailnut
 
Technology | 09.05.2008
Siemens, ThyssenKrupp to Dissolve Maglev Train Company
Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Despite big plans, the maglev train idea has not been met with commercial success

Siemens and ThyssenKrupp are to dissolve their partnership in the Transrapid International company making the high-speed magnetic levitation train, the two companies announced.

The decision on Thursday, May 8, came after the city of Munich decided in March to abandon plans for a 37-kilometre (23-mile) line linking the city centre with the airport.

Despite the dissolution of the company, "the core competencies of the Transrapid technology" would remain in the possession of Siemens and thyssenKrupp, they said.

The companies said they remained dedicated to promoting the system and were continuing talks with possible customers in China and the United States.

In announcing their decision after a board meeting in Erlangen in the southern state of Bavaria, electrical engineering concern Siemens and steelmaker
ThyssenKrupp said Transrapid's main office in Berlin would close on Oct. 1.

Employees seconded to Transrapid would return to the parent companies, they said.

Commercial service in China

The only Transrapid in commercial service operates in China along a 30-kilometre (19-mile) route between downtown Shanghai and the city's airport.

There is also a test track at Lathen in the Emsland region of northern Germany, where 23 people were killed in a September 2006 accident.

Magnetic-levitation systems use powerful magnets to glide the trains along a monorail without friction at speeds of up to 500 kilometres per hour.

Although the technology was first patented in the 1930s and serious attempts to realize its potential began four decades ago, the maglev train idea has to date failed to find a significant market.

  by 3rdrail
 
DutchRailnut wrote:The companies said they remained dedicated to promoting the system and were continuing talks with possible customers in China and the United States.

  by jtr1962
 
VikingNik wrote:I bet the costs are a minimum of ten times that, or maybe per 100 miles.

A 220 mph train using technologies that exist today and not 50 years from now could get you across country in less than 20 hours. With fuel going to the moon let alone the stratosphere, we might and likely will be resetting our expectations on travel and a time like that for LA to NYC really won't be considered so bad.
At the current state of the art running speed of 217 mph you could average about 180 mph with stops every 100 miles or so. This gives enough stops to serve quite a few intermediate destinations and give a trip time on the order of 16 hours.

I do tend to agree that we're going to have to rethink our expectations on travel time. I expect as air travel gets costly it will once again become the province of the rich, if it even continues to exist at all. If flights become a trickle, few cities can continue to justify using acres of expensive land for heavily underutilized runways. Business travel will likely be greatly curtailed, thus sharply reducing the frequency and ubiquity of air travel. In other words, air travel will no longer be practical to serve the occasional vacation traveler. However, this won't really matter much in the scheme of things. If you only do a cross-country trip a few times in your life, or even once a year, it will be entirely irrevelant whether the trip takes 16 to 20 hours on a high-speed train, or perhaps 8 to 9 hours by air (once you count airport security delays, traveling to/from airports). Obviously the time differential between flying and HSR will be even less, and less relevant, on shorter trips. I suspect HSR will pretty much end up doing domestically what air and Interstate auto travel currently do. As a bonus, we get lots of new land in cities as airports and highways are downsized and eliminated.

Further into the future, I suspect that maglev in evacuated tubes might supplement HSR for longer trips. In fact, for time sensitive and cost sensitive business travel to resume over continental distances now that cheap air travel is on the way out, I feel vacuum-tube maglev is really the only option left.

Re: German maglev project Kaput.

  by lpetrich
 
I find it hard to take seriously the idea of a continent-length vacuum tube. There's the serious problem of possible leaks -- how will that be handled? Will the tubes have airlock doors and crossovers every few 10s of mi/km? That would likely be necessary to enable detouring by crossover around a disabled train.

And construction will be a nightmare. Will the entire length of tube be in a tunnel? Or will some of the tube be above ground?

Turning to Transrapid, its sort of maglev does not seem very fail-safe, since it has only a few cm margin of error, and since its levitation system is dynamically unstable -- it requires continuous computer correction. There are other maglev designs, like Japan's, which are more robust and fail-safe. They work by the train's lift magnets generating eddy currents in the track as the train moves; these currents then repel the train's magnets, keeping the train levitated. This effect does not work when the train is moving too slowly, however, and the trains thus have rubber-tire wheels to use when that happens.


As to the more typical sort of HSR, it would be hard to justify building the western half of a transcontinental line between the east and west coasts, like from New York City to Los Angeles.

The eastern half would be no problem; east of a line running from western Minnesota to central Texas, one can easily find routes with cities with at least 100,000 people every 100 miles or so. And various HSR proposals do indeed cover much of that area, especially the flatter parts.

But west of it is serious -- one has to go much farther before one can find sizable cities. West of the Minnesota-Texas line, a NYC-LA line would go Lincoln - Denver - Salt Lake City - Las Vegas, with separations of 450 - 500 mi between cities. Going to SF would require SLC - Reno, a similar distance, and going to Portland or Seattle would require an even greater distance from SLC.

Lincoln - Denver and other east-of-Denver routes will be fairly easy to build HSR lines for, because of the flatness of the terrain, but that cannot be said of the west-of-Denver parts, which are very mountainous.

So in a post-petroleum world where aviation has become expensive due to the expense of its fuel, we may have a national airline that specializes in long-distance travel ("Amfly"?).

Re: German maglev project Kaput.

  by Nasadowsk
 
lpetrich wrote:I find it hard to take seriously the idea of a continent-length vacuum tube. There's the serious problem of possible leaks -- how will that be handled? Will the tubes have airlock doors and crossovers every few 10s of mi/km? That would likely be necessary to enable detouring by crossover around a disabled train.
Let's see, for large vessels, the best practice is nuclear reactor containments, where a 2% leakage rate is about the most they'll accept. Getting THAT requires x-raying EVERY weld, and generally multiple seals and all. Penetrations are fun, too.

BTW, at some of the speeds being tossed around by wishful thinkers who've seen too many cable TV shows, even a minor amount of air would be a major hazzard - go look up what the X-15 did at various altitudes, and that a refined design with high temperature alloys and NOT a long term heat-soak.
Turning to Transrapid, its sort of maglev does not seem very fail-safe, since it has only a few cm margin of error, and since its levitation system is dynamically unstable -- it requires continuous computer correction.
Yes. That they got the attraction mode to work as well as it did is an achievement.
So in a post-petroleum world where aviation has become expensive due to the expense of its fuel, we may have a national airline that specializes in long-distance travel ("Amfly"?).
No. Since a) we're a long way off from that. b) there's more and more serious talk of hydrogen powered aircraft (don't laught, there's a safety advantage to it, among other things) and c)aircraft are getting progressively more efficient, and there's a bit of room left to go - relaxed stability, geared turbofans, flying wings, etc etc etc. The current generation coming out of A and B's doors are a heck of a lot better than even 15 years ago.

And most of all, the public's seen what happened to nationalized passenger rail. Everytime you try to sell Amair, everyone will point to Amtrak.
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