Japanese railway operator to license maglev tech to US for free

http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japanese-railway-operator-to-offer-maglev-tech-to-US-for-free

by nkurz • 12 years ago

135 60 12 years ago

asia.nikkei.com

markbao• 12 years ago

Japanese railway operator to license maglev tech to US for free

stingraycharles• 12 years ago

So that means they can use the tech, but not redistribute it to anyone else? Sounds pretty fair to me.

arrrg• 12 years ago

The technology has existed for so long but never really went anywhere. After half a century there are 30km in Shanghai, that’s all.

Maybe it will work out better in the future.

The biggest problem I see is that the gains of this technology would be rather small anywhere with conventional high-speed rail or existing infrastructure that can be upgraded to that. With Maglev everything needs to be built from scratch. That’s just not very attractive for any place that has consistently expanded its rail network ever since the height of the industrial revolution.

And for what? A 180km/h faster train? I personally very much want that, sure, but is it worth it for anyone building it? I’m pretty sure I know the answer in Western Europe (though I can always hope that maglev has a future there), I’m not so sure when it comes to the US.

meddlepal• 12 years ago

If the NEC could do 200MPH consistently Boston-NYC-DC ... that would be huge. Boston to NYC in 1 hour and Boston to DC in 2 hours would be amazing and would be far faster than airport or vehicle travel.

ericd• 12 years ago

If this was reasonably priced, it would increase travel between those cities by a large amount.

willholloway• 12 years ago

I ride the North East Corridor rails often and have clocked the Acela at 130 MPH via GPS going into Boston, and the Northeast Regional hits 115 MPH in spots from Eastern CT to NYC.

The route is just too winding for those speeds in so many places and you end up going 60MPH for much of the trip.

The best views going north are past the Connecticut river, rolling through Niantic, to New London and the small coastal villages like Mystic, and heading south the rail bridge that runs next to the Triborough gives you a fantastic panorama of Manhattan's east side.

I love the train.

seszett2• 12 years ago

You don't need maglev for that, though, high-speed rail can reach those speeds.

And a big advantage of rail is that the trains can just run on conventional track and progressively go faster while portions of the track are converted to high-speed, while maglev needs a complete run of maglev track before it starts being usable.

rayiner• 12 years ago

The northeast is as dense as western Europe.

Tuna-Fish• 12 years ago

The density isn't really the issue, it's that high-speed rolling stock is simply too good for the massive investment to replace it to be worth it.

In the US, the railway system was developed for freight primarily, and is not suitable for high-speed rail. So, if you want faster trains, you have to lay new track regardless. In that situation, maglev is not necessarily a terrible choice.

danielsiders• 12 years ago

Or even the Taiheiyo belt in Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt

bpicolo• 12 years ago

And yet nowhere close to as dense as Japan.

biot• 12 years ago

Quite a long time... I rode the maglev train at the Japan pavilion at Expo '86. It was so smooth you almost couldn't tell you were moving.

melling3• 12 years ago

"And for what? A 180km/h faster train?"

Going an extra 110mph(180km/h) would be a huge win. It greatly extends the distance where a train wins over a jet.

Also consider, for instance, in the NYC area, you could live 100 miles away from Manhattan and easily commute to work. That means you could live in downtown Philly and work in Manhattan, 30 minutes away. The world becomes a lot smaller.

cafard• 12 years ago

It seems to me that you would need to exercise a fair bit of eminent domain, and there you might find that the world is indeed smaller.

The article mentions Washington to Baltimore as the first segment to be built. The existing rail lines pass over a number of level crossings, and pass under some bridge spans that are fairly snug for the existing track. And the mile or two before you get to Baltimore's Penn Station are in tunnel. I doubt the tunnel has much width to spare--how much would it cost in 2014 to widen a couple of miles of tunnel under a densely built city?

ekianjo3• 12 years ago

Going an extra 110mph(180km/h) would be a huge win. It greatly extends the distance where a train wins over a jet.

Not really, because jets will go much more places that your single maglev line ever will. That's the problem with hi-tech trains. They are extremely costly to deploy in terms of infrastructure, they go over land that could be used for other purposes, and because of the large investment required they only go in very few places. Jets win everywhere else.

xxpor• 12 years ago

Also consider, for instance, in the NYC area, you could live 100 miles away from Manhattan and easily commute to work.

This is not a good thing.

tunesmith• 12 years ago

I don't think the appetite for train travel is a linear thing. For instance here in the Seattle/Portland corridor, the train trip is both slower than by car, and more expensive than the car's gas bill. If it were consistently faster and/or cheaper, I can't help but think that the demand would spike dramatically.

Istof• 12 years ago

Japan also offer loans to USA for building maglev trains http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1055533...

jlj_20• 12 years ago

What about Elon Musk's hyperloop venture, are they in the running?

stcredzero• 12 years ago

Elon Musk's Hyperloop makes sense from first principles. Most people and therefore most governments don't think that way.

omegant• 12 years ago

Yes, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies exists (I'm volunteer), they are going to design and build a prototipe using crowdsourcing engineering (not capital as far as I know). Also they have contact with several universities and companies that are interested in partnering and developint part of the systems. Right now they are working in the legal parts of the company and mean while there is a brainstorming at the engineering part with calculations beyond tha alpha document. It's a hard process as the technology is so new, but amazing non the less. The idea is to start building and testing a scale prototipe for 2015 in LA.

ChrisNorstrom• 12 years ago

Japan's maglev technology (EDS) is very different from Germany's maglev technology (EMS) that's being used in Shanghai. One pulls the train up electromagnetically to a steel track and the other uses permanent magnets to push the train away from the track. Both are still going nowhere. And it's for good reason.

● Both are extremely expensive per mile compared to HSR (high speed rail). Sure it's faster than high speed rail but a technology doesn't make it because it's better, but because it's more practical to implement.

● Service is not as tried and trusted as HSR. Germany's test facilities have been torn down after the Shangai maglev was built and Japan's maglev hasn't been expanded. On an emotional human level it just doesn't feel trustworthy. If you're not growing you're dying.

● Both technologies are proprietary whereas HSR has more companies and manufacturers to chose from.

● HSR could probably compete with maglev speeds by building a wider gauge track, using larger wheels, and implementing more aerodynamic designs to reduce drag and power consumption.

● Germany and Japan are pitching their maglev trains while they themselves aren't avid users of them.

=== Lessons ===

If you want something to succeed sometimes you have to set it free.

If you're not expanding or growing you're dying.

If you want people to use your solution, instill trust by investing in and using your own solution.

rangibaby• 12 years ago

A full Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka maglev (SCMaglev) line is under construction in Japan right now, with the Tokyo-Nagoya leg due to be in operation by 2027.[0]

As if late, traditional HSR is getting a lot of competition (in Japan at least) from domestic flights that cost almost exactly the same and take about the same amount of time. This has led to a resurgence of the "old" airports in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuo_Shinkansen

snogglethorpe• 12 years ago

You don't appear to have kept up with Japanese maglev development in the last decade or so. Japan actually is going ahead with a major maglev line, to the tune of almost $100 billion (privately financed by JR central).

ulfw4• 12 years ago

Japan is spending a crapload of money building their maglev line between their two biggest cities. How is that being 'no avid users' of them?

denzil_correa• 12 years ago

Is there a specific reason to license it for "free" or is there something more to it than meets the eye?

fredgrott• 12 years ago

Its not the speed, its the distance between the stops..

Let me give you an example...in the midwest USA there is a short commuter line called South Shore that runs from SouthBend Indiana to southern shore of Lake Michigan and up to the Loop in Chicago

Most of the stations on the South Shore are either blocks apart or a few miles apart..which negates a high speed rail solution

ThePhysicist6• 12 years ago

I think the problem with the US railway system is not the lack of technology, but politics: People seem to love bold and mostly unrealistic proposals like Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" or the Maglev technology but seem to be a lot less passionate about making existing infrastructure better (which understandably is much more boring):

As an example, I just took the Amtrak train from NYC to Montreal to attend PyCon (which is awesome!), which took all in all 11 hours to cover a distance a little over 530 km. For comparison, going from my hometown Saarbrücken in Germany to Paris (which is about the same distance) takes less than two hours (1:40h to be exact) with TGV or ICE trains. Arguably for the latter there is no border to be crossed (OK actually there is but none that is patroled) but still, this kind of makes you wonder why a high-tech nation like the USA doesn't have a similar system of high-speed trains in place, and I think that the answer has more to do with political unwillingness and lobbying than with lack of technology.

BTW, in Germany there once was an attempt to build a Transrapid (our version of Maglev that is deployed in Shanghai, developed by Siemens http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid) track to connect the Munich airport to the city centre (see "Munich Link" section in the article above), but calculations showed that the achievable time saving compared to the latest generation of ICE high-speed trains would be only 3 minutes, whereas the additional cost would have been around 3 BN €, which lead to the project being eventually ditched.

johansch• 12 years ago

Slightly off-topic: I've noticed that public transport from city center to airport kind of suck in larger german cities.

In e.g. Berlin (for SXF at least), Frankfurt and Munich there's only the fantastically slow S-Bahn, with ride times around 40-60 minutes.

ThePhysicist6• 12 years ago

Agreed, Frankfurt and Hamburg are pretty ok though. And in Berlin it's not only the transportation to the airport but the airport itself that sucks ;) *

*the announced opening date of the new airport has been delayed by several years to the point where it's questionable if it will ever open...

ulfw4• 12 years ago

Munich is ridiculous. Taking the S Bahn to the airport takes and hour and literally stops at tons with barely more than a handful of houses (where also no one seems to get on or off). Waste of time.

sosborn• 12 years ago

I think that the answer has more to do with political unwillingness and lobbying than with lack of technology

I think it is a bit less nefarious than that. The simple fact is that there is not a whole lot of demand for these services. The major corridors are covered just fine (planes, trains and automobiles) and building a high speed train wouldn't really offer too much benefit and the cost would be astronomical.

ThePhysicist6• 12 years ago

That's kind of hard to believe with the Montreal region having more than 4.5 million inhabitants and NY more than 10 million, surely some of them would like to take the train between the two cities once in a while.

I understand though that in the US planes and automobiles are considered viable alternatives to trains, especially considering the average distances between cities here, which tend to be much larger than in Europe.

ensignavenger• 12 years ago

Why do you think "Hyperloop" is unrealistic?

ThePhysicist6• 12 years ago

Basically for two reasons:

-To my knowledge it's still a completely hypothetical technology without an existing proof-of-concept prototype, so it's unclear how fast it could be brought to maturity.

-Supposing it could be realized as planned it's still unlikely that the initial cost-effectiveness would be better than that of existing, alternative solutions such as the Maglev, Transrapid or even conventional bullet trains, which haven't yet reached their theoretical limitations in speed and efficiency.

An example: At an hypothetical average speed of 960 km/h (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop), the Hyperloop could traverse the distance between LA and SF in about 30 mins. For comparison, the current speed record for a TGV is 560 km/h, which yields a theoretical travel time of slightly less than 1 hour for the same route. I think it's questionable whether the 30 minute gain in travel time would justify the large amount or R&D necessary to make the Hyperloop a reality, let alone make this a viable economic undertaking. Of course this doesn't mean that it's impossible (it is not), just that I think it won't become a reality in the near future (but then again, people tend to be horribly wrong when making predictions about this kind of stuff).

hatbert• 12 years ago

When Musk unveiled Hyperloop, he used sleight of hand to make it look dramatically less expensive than the conventional rail system currently being built. Specifically, Hyperloop, as proposed, only runs within the central valley, from the northern side of the San Gabriel Mountains to the eastern side of the Diablo Range. San Francisco is on the western side of the Diablos and Los Angeles is on the southern side of the San Gabriels. It adds an one to two hours (on each end) to drive from the city center to the proposed hyperloop endpoint.

It should surprise no one that it is less expensive to build a track which avoids crossing two mountain ranges--yet Musk compared the cost of building a hyperloop in the central valley to that of a building a conventional train from LA to San Francisco. When you compare apples to apples (conventional vs. hyperloop in the central valley), conventional rail comes out much cheaper.

ulfw4• 12 years ago

That's because railways lines in the US are over 100 years old and France's TGV runs on dedicated tracks and right of ways. Btw shootout to SB. I was born/grew up in Saarland too. Small world!

ThePhysicist6• 12 years ago

Yeah it's a small world indeed! Admittedly dedicated tracks are a great thing, but even in Germany where tracks are shared between local trains and ICEs the average travel speed is pretty decent.

fidotron• 12 years ago

Like many routes in the US/Canada the NYC<->Montreal one is shared with freight, and for a significant distance on it there's only one track. Since the freight lines own the track they take priority, so the passenger trains have to go slowly, and often give way.

That route, picturesque though it is, is also not remotely economically viable. The parts of New York state it connects to are very poor compared to the endpoints, and it just doesn't get enough passengers. New York subsidise it to provide those communities with some links. (A drive through more remote parts of NY can be really depressing, but the Adirondacks are amazing).

The simple reality is an improved normal speed train service wouldn't make a difference, but the cost to build high speed is ridiculous either because the distances are too large or you're in already built up areas.

api• 12 years ago

I think the real problem is that Americans identify cars with freedom and rail with "socialism" or something. Throughout much of the U.S. there is a profound anti-public-transit sentiment. It's viewed as a waste of money, a boondoggle, etc.

fsckin• 12 years ago

If you ever have the chance to ride the Shanghai maglev from Pudong airport into the city, splurge a little bit for first class. It's incredibly relaxing before or after a long flight and watching the world fly past at 270mph and not feeling crowded or touching other people for 8 minutes.

Oh, and don't trust any taxi driver who speaks English, you're extremely likely to be scammed. Don't ask me how I know.

Japanese railway operator to license maglev tech to US for free

Related Stories