MAGLEV Munich (Muenchen) Germany Project Kaput.

Germany scraps Munich maglev line

In a controversial decision, German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee says a planned Transrapid maglev line linking Munich and its airport has "collapsed because costs have nearly doubled to an estimated $5.37 billion."

German industry, led by Siemens, has developed 300-mph magnetic levitation technology during the last several decades, but so far only one commercial Transrapid line has been built: a mid-city to airport connector in Shanghai.

Germany's transport minister came under immediate criticism from rail and industrial interests who saw it as a blow to the country's technological prestige. The state of Bavaria had pledged $1.48 billion toward the cost of the airport maglev line and Siemens had pledged $800 million.

The maglev idea remains alive in the U.S., encouraged by a trickle of seed money from the federal Department of Transportation, and no one is willing to write it off in Germany, where previous maglev proposals have foundered, only to be followed by new ones.

Is the maglev idea still considered viable? I have heard rumblings on this forum (I think) that maglev may not have much of a future compared to good, fast conventional trains...which may be a bit slower but way cheaper. Maybe its time simply has not come, and we should check back in 50 years?

That's nothing. If Merkel's coalition falls apart (and it's still quite shaky), another transportation minister would be on the way in and could restart the project. Wolfgang could be out of a job sooner than he thinks.

Right now I think maglev will be on the backseat as speed is less of a concern as energy efficiency and reducing our oil consumption. Also, with the recession we need things built fast and affordably. The only places that just might be crazy enough to build it right now are Las Vegas or Dubai since money practically makes itself there.

Maglev's dead because it can't integrate with the existing rail network, and in any case, the French have shown that you can run regular rail, at least experimentally, at more or less the same speed.

The biggest problem with maglev is that at 350mph, the energy required to go through the air is huge at sea level. Airliners fly so high, in part, because the thinner air cuts drag, dramatically reducing energy requirements. Early jet engines actually worked pretty poorly at altitude, but the drag reduction made up for it. From the JT-8D, CF-6, etc onward, they got more efficient at altitude, which is partly why airliner energy use has dropped dramatically over the years - they've optimised the engines for cruise petty well these days, though the next big leaps are coming soon - geared turbofans could bring a huge efficiency gain, if they ever get them working right. Given the gains that could be realized immediately (to say nothing of the second generation), there's no doubt it's a technology that will happen, and very soon.

Maglev probably makes no sense for open-air, sea level travel due to the energy and noise issues, and also the fact that HSR is nearly as fast, and way more flexible. This doesn't mean maglev is dead. I think in a generation it will be viable, but as a replacement for airliners, not trains. Running in evacuated tubes, maglev can reach speeds far in excess of even the Concorde at way less power consumption. More importantly, they are safer than planes, don't consume valuable real estate for airports, don't make lots of noise, can't be flown into buildings, and can stop directly in city centers. It's simply a matter of waiting for all the pieces to come together. Higher fuel prices and possibly terrorism will continue to make air travel more expensive. And let's face it, even at its best air travel isn't very comfortable. Many (myself included) utterly refuse to use it, period, due to its many shortcomings. The influx into cities as the suburban living arrangement enters failure mode will mean a greater desire to put land used by airports to more productive use. Cheaper methods of building the lengthy tunnels required will be the final piece of the puzzle. Just as the Internet wasn't ready for prime time 20 or 30 years ago, neither is maglev. The pieces of the puzzle will eventually fall into place.

HSR, conventional rail, and subways will still serve as vital links to the maglev corridors. By definition these ultra high-speed lines won't be cheap even with better tunneling technologies. My guess is at best we'll get a grid of them spaced a few hundred miles apart along with one or two transatlantic and transpacific lines. Ways to connect at either end of the journey if one isn't going to major cities will be needed. Look for major construction and investment to start in perhaps 20 years.

The Maglev people in Germany have been waiting for 30 or so years now.
I visited the test loop 26 years ago and they are not any closer to getting a commercial one build.
Even China is not impressed by the technology.

The recent speed record by the TGV was basically the final nail in the coffin.

Maglev was developed, like those silly air cushion vehicles, at a time when everyone 'knew' that it was 'impossible' for a train to go faster than 125mph.

Well, 40 years later, the French solved most of the big issues, the Japanese have, and the rest of the world has. Today, running a train at 186mph is common, running at 200+mph will be the norm in 5 - 10 years (it's happening NOW).

Maglev's produced exactly one commercial application, in a country that likes to 'borrow' technology from others. In the mean time, there's a few thousand miles of high speed rail out there.

Whatever advantages maglev brings to the table (and it doesn't seem like there are any), aren't enough to overcome its disadvantages.

It's the typical story of a technology looking for a problem - history's full of such examples.

Maglev's still a big status symbol in spite of all the debacles surrounding it. There isn't any way we're going to see 300 mph in commercial passenger service on the venerable steel boulevard, in spite of SNCF's tests; and it's going to take a maverick (most likely political) to put maglev into practice.

Energy costs (that everybody cites but nobody ever quotes)? What happened to 3¢ per passenger mile? (The TGV costs 5.6¢/passenger mile.) How about 7¢ per revenue ton-mile for freight? (Double-stack trains cost 14¢ per RTM.) Or $12 million per mile for Maglev guideway? (Compare SNCF's $25 million per mile on the LGV Est, which is the cheapest I've seen so far.)

This move was way overdue. I attended a presentation at the Transportation Research Board in DC in 2007 where a panel of European experts had basically said that the cost:benefit analysis of Maglev or vacuum-tube transit makes no sense in the face of where the French and Japanese have pushed conventional HSR, on a platform that can integrate with legacy lines into city centers.

I asked the panel in the Q&A if the US should scuttle their maglev program, too. They all laughed, but none would take the bait.

Like I said, it's not dead. All it would take is another politician to come in and push it. For example, Edmund Stoiber has been behind the project all along (for those that think his political career's dead, think again).

Maglev could be built aerodynamic enough for open-air operation at speeds like 500 or 600 mph. That has the potential of beating anything in the air across continental distances.

What exactly were the specifics of these alleged cost/benefit analyses? and how did they clash with the figures I quoted in this thread? Remember, such analyses have been tweaked to become barriers to "SWOSR" high-speed rail development in the USA.

I don't know what SWOSR is, so I can't respond. The TRB annual meeting is the top-level peer-reviewed conference for cutting edge transportation on earth.

The paper in question, and the presentation which led comparisons of maglev to the even more nonsensical vacuum tube HSR is:

ASSESSING THE FEASIBILITY OF TRANSPORT MEGA-PROJECTS:
SWISSMETRO EUROPEAN MARKET STUDY
Andrew Nash (corresponding author), Ulrich Weidmann, Stefan Buchmueller, Markus Rieder
Institute for Transportation Planning and Systems
ETH Zurich
Switzerland
October 24, 2006


http://www.ivt.ethz.ch/oev/index_EN

SWOSR = "steel wheels on steel rails".

I cannot find the study on that website you linked.

I looked up "Andrew Nash", and I came across several papers on his website, with odd titles such as "From Engineers to Entrepreneurs: The need for social innovation in high speed rail systems", so I am left wondering what kind of political and business agenda such consultants as this hold.

RVRR 15 wrote:SWOSR = "steel wheels on steel rails".

I cannot find the study on that website you linked.

I looked up "Andrew Nash", and I came across several papers on his website, with odd titles such as "From Engineers to Entrepreneurs: The need for social innovation in high speed rail systems", so I am left wondering what kind of political and business agenda such consultants as this hold.

Exactly ! There is another Maglev discussion going on here:

http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopi ... highlight=

I agree that agendas are in place with a consortium of interests wanting to see Maglev discredited. I have also had a discussion on this thread with Mr. Nasadowsk as regards to comparisons made between the efficiencies of jet travel vs. Maglev. I made the point that a side by side 2008 comparison is grossly unfair due to the fact that Maglev technology is still in it's early stages, while aircraft technology isn't. Let's see what happens when a little real money, initiative, and study is applied to the study of a vehicle that in many ways compensates for many forces (gravitational, centrifugal, and centripetal), dragging down all others.

RVRR 15 wrote:SWOSR = "steel wheels on steel rails".

I cannot find the study on that website you linked.

I looked up "Andrew Nash", and I came across several papers on his website, with odd titles such as "From Engineers to Entrepreneurs: The need for social innovation in high speed rail systems", so I am left wondering what kind of political and business agenda such consultants as this hold.

Did you read that paper? It's a pretty good one, too.

Try this, but you may have to pay for it:
http://trb.metapress.com/content/87255570132h44j6/

If not, the short conclusion of the study is primarily that a vacuum tube HSR system makes no sense in Europe because it would be expensive and most likely outcompeted by air service and traditional HSR in the corridors where the investment would make sense.

By 2020, most of the corridors in Europe that would generate enough traffic to warrant the investment to put in a brand-new, underground, vacuum-tube HSR will already have conventional SWOSR HSR, and the technology development timeframe predicted for vacuum tube HSR implementation was no sooner than 2045.

Add in the fact that vacuum tube HSR costs nearly 4 times as much as conventional TGV construction, and is unlikely to be much faster, and it quickly becomes a "what's the point" technology. I asked the presenters if maglev technology faced the same barriers to wider implementation, and they said the case is the same.

Maglev:

• Has higher per-mile costs than HSR
  Is not compatible with legacy lines at low speeds and cannot leverage existing infrastructure
  No longer has a significant speed advantage over TGV-style HSR

These things are not in doubt. The study is not a Heritage Foundation/anti-rail faux study you are used to reading in the USA. It is a technological assessment that clearly states there is a powerful place for high-speed rail in the transportation markets of Europe, that there is a definitive winner in technology, and that winner is conventional TGV-style HSR. This being the case, continued exploratory investments in maglev and vacuum-tube systems are essentially considerable wastes of time and money that could be better spent moving more conventional rail lines in Europe to higher speeds, particularly those over 186 mph.