Japan's maglev train runs test at over 310 mph (with video) | Hacker News Reader

Japan's maglev train runs test at over 310 mph (with video)

phys.org

97 pointsjonbaer91 comments

Not bad, it's not completely clear from the article but checking wikipedia L0 should be a "production" maglev, similar to Shanghai's Transrapid (except Transrapid's maximum operating speed is 410km/h. It did reach 501km/h in early test runs but doesn't reach that on scheduled traffic).

It's good to see that tech finally get in production (Japan's maglev demonstrators first breached 500km/h in 1979).

FWIW, if all goes well the L0 should be used in the (planned) Chuo-Shinkansen line going straight from Tokyo to Osaka through Nagoya in 67mn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuo_Shinkansen (the fastest runs on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen currently take 2h25)

Pretty sure the Shanghai Transrapid does 430kph in regular use, or at least it was the last time I rode on it. Definitely worth taking for the trip from the airport into Pudong if you're ever flying into Shanghai.

Considering the cost, time of construction, time saving, the project doesn't seem to make much sense. China already dropped maglev due to high cost. On the other hand, Japan is making very slow progress on cleaning up its nuclear mess and almost all of its nuclear reactors are suspended right now. Why a new railway is more important than nuclear disaster in hand?

Remember how governments work. Transportation and energy are different budgets managed by different entities.

Not to mention that the Chuo Shinkansen will be privately financed, and is being built by a private company, JR central. They almost certainly need government cooperation (you can hardly escape that with something so huge and covering so much geographical area), but this isn't a Japanese government project, and the government isn't paying for it.

From Wikipedia: "On December 25, 2007, JR Central announced that it plans to raise funds for the construction of the Chuo Shinkansen on its own, without government financing."

To put this into perspective, the distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 506KM.

It's roughly comparable to:

* Ottawa->Toronto (449KM)

* LA->San Francisco (622KM)

* Washington DC->NYC (363KM)

310 mph in 2013.

As opposed to 220 mph top speed in the year 2029 for california "high speed" rail.

What a bright, wondrous future we will all be living in!

Isn't the maglev to be used publicly only in 2027 ?

From the article: The line between Tokyo and Osaka is expected to cost approximately $90 billion and it won't be completed until 2045

I think California's high speed rail project should be cancelled, but big infrastructure projects do cost a lot of money and take a long time, both in Japan and the US.

It's going to be even more expensive in 30-40 years to build a maglev between LA and SF. Much of the cost is in obtaining the land. Wouldn't it be cheaper to build the first train now then turn it into a 320 mph maglev in 40 years?

The cost is going to be high, maybe $100 billion by the time the project is done. Even with the feds helping, that is a huge sum. Are we really going to get the most "bang" for our bucks? How often do people travel between LA and SF anyways? Improve BART, VTA light rail and CalTrain (in the Bay Area), and I suspect it will have a much larger positive impact on the lives of more people.

* How often do people travel between LA and SF anyways?*

According to the WSJ, 6 million people per year travel between LA & SF via air every year. I can't find highway numbers, but I gotta believe it's about the same order of magnitude, if not higher.

Improve BART, VTA light rail and CalTrain (in the Bay Area), and I suspect it will have a much larger positive impact on the lives of more people.

All of the above need to be done, both will have a positive impact of even more people.

Cal-HSRA predicts that by 2040 the train will reduce highway miles traveled by 10 million miles a day[1]. For comparison, in May 2013, there were 15.3 billion miles of travel just on California highways[2]. A reduction of 10 million miles a day would be about 2%, and assuming people continue to move into the state, the number of highway mile traveled per day will likely be quite a bit higher in 2040 than it is today.

I don't know, it just doesn't seem like a very compelling argument to me. The state doesn't have unlimited resources. Spend the money where it will do the most good.

[1] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/newsroom/fact%20sheets/Good%20for...

[2] most recent month with available statistics, lots more data available here http://traffic-counts.dot.ca.gov/

A reduction of 10 million miles a day would be about 2%,

In highway terms, that's a significant reduction. A reduction on the order of 1-3% (it depends on a number of factors including number of lanes, and distance between exits) can get you from LOS F traffic (stop & go) to LOD C/D traffic (heavy, but moving traffic).

There would be a huge benefit from a high speed rail network in California, for sure.

My main issue is the way they are going about it, which is a highly politicized construction process along with some really out-of-order prioritization.

It would be much better to start with the low hanging fruit, like grade separation and electrification of Caltrain. That line would benefit immensely from some major upgrades, such as longer station platforms. To be fair, the most recent round of upgrades (ctc, quadruple track sections, new rolling stock) have been very well done.

That's precisely why these kind of high speed trains have no future. They cost way too much in infrastructure.

Right. And the initial railways that crossed the US were affordable?

Right. Did we have planes, cars and so on when we build the initial railways?

I thought so.

I think the Japanese route includes a lot of tunnelling, including under cities and through mountains.

California will never build their line. They'll soak up the federal money in study after study, and will ultimately decide it's uneconomical. In the meantime, projects like the Southeastern High Speed Rail Corridor¹, which is actually acquiring right of way and straightening rail lines to permit high speed travel, will be starved of funds.

¹ http://www.sehsr.org

California will never build their line.

CA HSR authority signed a construction contract with Tutor Perini to start construction in the coming weeks. It's happening.

* In the meantime, projects like the Southeastern High Speed Rail Corridor [..] will be starved of funds.*

This isn't an either/or situation, we can (and are) doing both.

The section in construction is a line to nowhere that will see no high speed traffic for years, if ever.

The portions that must be worked on first is the crossing of the Tehachapi mountains, as it is the most time consuming portion. Yet instead, they are constructing line in the southern Central Valley.

I agree with the pessimists. Much as I want high speed rail, I doubt it will happen.

The section they are construction is a section that a) will need to be built anyway, and b) be used as a test section to iron out the inevitable kinks that will pop up. The logic is that if a project is going to run into problems (which any large project, including this one, will) you may as well do the easier part first to make the later harder parts go more smoothly.

It would be logical to do that if it were a section that would see some measure if high speed use.

The section which would see that would be from Martinez to Davis. That segment sees many capital corridor trains daily and would immediately benefit from high speed service. What they are working on now sees a small fraction of the ridership, iirc.

It would be logical to do that if it were a section that would see some measure if high speed use.

Not necessarily - a lightly traveled starter corridor works well for a new system in terms of minimizing disruptions when the inevitable problems crop up.

To be honest, if it were up to me, I would recommend starting it where it would get the most ridership, but the CHSRA has a legitimate argument here. Also the project can more easily deal with adverse impacts in "the middle of nowhere" better then it could in a more heavily populated area.

Perhaps they can reallocate the $1.2 billion they set aside for prisons that was never spent.

California's share of federal support vs. taxes paid are much lower than those of southeastern states. If anything, the southeast (ironically, conservative and anti-tax) has been and continue to steal money from California (the opposite), not the other way around.

Are people really worried about the difference of one hour or so on intercity trips? I kind of doubt it's that big a deal. Rock solid on time schedule adherence is the key thing, which Amtrak can't even get close to now.

The other important thing would be more and better business class cars at a fair price. Business class should have strictly enforced quiet, be spotlessly clean, with totally reliable internet access.

I can't imagine there won't be major improvements to conventional high speed rail that will be able to run on existing lines. This requires an entirely new track that can't be used for anything else and the trainset itself can't be upgraded as easily as it is tied to the track. These will be also limited by the noise they produce; even if they can go faster in theory noise pollution is going to be a major issue as is. I'm not sure they have solved most of the tunnel boom problem; a major requirement in Japan.

So I wouldn't expect there will be a lot of room for improvement of this design over the next 30-60 years. It will probably cost a lot more than expected as well. Comparatively, there are a lot of new technologies that could deliver major improvements in transportation efficiency and speed without the large capital investment of a maglev line over the next 30-60 years from traditional rail to self-driving cars to new aircraft.

I'm really skeptical of the wisdom of this project to be honest. If you want a maglev design you might as well go with a near-vacuum tunnel and more than triple your speed rather than just increase it by 50%. This would also have the advantage of eliminating the noise issue. I believe China is looking at something like that.

The vast majority of cost of the project goes towards building the track (through the mountains, 60% of the distance will be inside tunnels). That investment will probably still be useable when train technology improves.

I think maglevs are actually quieter and have reduced rail\line wear than conventional track already.

Though i think a partially evacced tube would be amazing as well.

Maglev is quieter (much quieter) than conventional rail at lower speeds (below ~ 90 mph) but at higher speeds, once the aerodynamic noise region kicks in, they get very loud very quickly.

Why are maglevs so much slower than airplanes? We're looking at a factor of 2 difference and airports don't take over 30 years to install. Isn't the point of a maglev to reduce the friction against the ground, so aren't both planes and maglevs fighting primarily against air resistance? Or is it not that they can't go faster, just that it's too loud or they need to turn too much or something?

I think g-forces from turning is a real concern, but so is the fact that there's a lot more air at sea level than 30k feet. Planes land and take off at less than 200 mph.

Plotting (can't be all straight), air density (as mentioned by jessridel). Current high speed trains go at 180-200 mph due to sharply increased consumption above those speeds, even though they could go a lot faster in current setups.

In 30 years we'll probably have more efficient airplanes, and less fuel, so higher prices. Maybe it's more expensive in the short term, but it's much more sustainable to have ground-based transportation for trips under 400 or 500 miles.

In Spain, we have the Madrid-Barcelona route. It's 50 minutes by plane and 2h30 by train (620 km, 385 miles). Airports are outside cities, stations are in the center of them and very well connected by road and commuter trains from everywhere. It's gone from being one of the busiest air routes to losing more than half of its traffic to high speed train. Why? Much more comfortable and, in the end, takes the same time.

Air density on the ground. Air is a lot soupier close to the surface in the troposphere vs way up high in the stratosphere.

Most commercial flights are actually in the troposphere, which is about 17km deep in the temperate zone. Your point is still right: air density at 36000ft is ~0.37 kg/m^3, as opposed to 1.23 kg/m^3 at sea level.

To build on this, the drag force varies linearly with fluid density and quadraticly with velocity, so the four-fold increase in fluid density from airplane altitude to sea level corresponds to a doubling in velocity. Which is actually the difference we see! Cool!

I don't think it has much to do with air density as it does with guideway inductivity issues - which would limit it's top speed (aside from the obvious things like how curved the path is, if and where it has to make more gradual stops and turns, etc).

Jet propulsion and magnetic propulsion are fundamentally different. There are limits to what those magnets can push/pull, how much energy can be put into the system, and the stresses involved coming from the fields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_propulsion

Thanks for the answers everyone. One more question:

Can maglevs use jet propulsion to go faster?

Might as well just graduate and use warp-drive.

That would mean they have to carry fuel for the engines which they do not at the moment.

So yes, but you wouldn't want to

Sigh. I've got nothing against thinking big, but this is not the kind of investment Japan needs right now. BIG money, for only an incremental improvement. (The public transport infrastructure is already very good.)

If the boys in the ministry really wanted to boost Japan, they'd be investing in renewable energy, not playing with train sets. But there are too many vested interests...

The "ministry" isn't paying for it—it's being privately financed by JR central (which is a private company).

From Wikipedia: "On December 25, 2007, JR Central announced that it plans to raise funds for the construction of the Chuo Shinkansen on its own, without government financing."

An accounting trick to keep the debt off the government books.

A project of that scale could not possibly happen in Japan without whole-hearted government support.

(I know I sound like a grumpy cynic, but I've learnt from experience that one can rarely go wrong being cynical about powerful Japanese institutions.)

The government is certainly involved to a degree—you can hardly build something of this scale otherwise, there are simply too many third parties to deal with—but I've seen no reason to think that the financing is "an accounting trick."

Simple general cynicism is all well and good, but it isn't really worth much absent actual evidence.

This is particularly true in the case of JR-central / east / west, which are well-run and solid companies, and a model for how to do privatization successfully.

The article does not mention it, but 310 mph is still below previous maglev's speed records, done 10-15 years ago(!) on the same test line:

361.0 mph in December 2003

343.0 mph in April 1999

329.9 mph in December 1997

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCMaglev#Manned_records

It's one thing to set test records with test equipment, and another to set them with production equipment -- this model is the actual train they're going to run on the line. Kind of like how the Bell X-1 was the first supersonic aircraft, but the Concorde was the first commercial supersonic aircraft.

(And I have a sneaky suspicion that Japan's maglev, running in a depopulating country with economy in a terminal downward spiral, will end up as marginal and unprofitable as the Concorde, but that's another story.)

The comparison with the Concorde was the first thing that sprang to mind with me, too.

Shanghai has been operating Maglev line for more than 6 years, see [1] and [2]. The top speed is 431km/h and 268 mph. The Japanese line will have much higher capacity as the Shanghai one is not full production design, but I don't think it has material advantage. The real challenge is economics and noise, and China decided to go with conventional high speed railway system. Even HSR was designed for 350km/h, it is actually operated at 270-300 km/h to reduce operating cost.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-54gBLwK3s

One important note: the Chinese HSR is also operating at reduced speed for safety and rail wear reasons.

That makes me curious what the braking performance and stopping distance is relative to normal trains and at different speeds.

A quick look at wikipedia[1] shows that these trains often have regenerative braking which means you can have both the wheels and the maglev system stopping the train. So at the same speeds these should be able to brake faster than traditional trains.

I assume these have the potential of going significantly faster than normal trains making braking harder. In this test though they didn't reach even the peak speed of normal trains. Apparently the french TGV has the record for normal trains at 575km/h[2] (vs 500km/h in this test) even though normal operation is "only" 320km/h.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Power_and_energy_usage

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV

The difference is that the TGV you mentioned was a highly modified version just for this speed record. The L0 [1] shown in the video is planned to be the production train and run 500km/h in actual service.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0_Series_Shinkansen

Then again both train use different technology. Running gear on a TGV is a massive friction generator compared to a maglev, I would think, and consequently the record is very impressive. Still I would love maglev line to be build through Europe.

Nah. Space and diminishing returns have been the main blocks for improving EU HSR investment since quite a long time. Dedicated lines take up space that could be used by local rail, are expensive to build, and while they work in an all-the-rails-lead-to-Paris mode, in a less centralized country they're significantly less effective.

In fact, three countries probably most often praised for railway quality would be Switzerland (barely any HSR, and huge fail, and while they are adding more tracks between Zurich, Bern and Geneva, they're going to be used by local traffic as well), Netherlands (where railways were limited to 140km/h for way too long, and HSR is also limited) and Germany (there is an extensive HSR network, but it's significantly slower than the French one. All also because getting it faster would cost more than it's worth for them). French HSR is excellent, but the railways in general are a bit lacking (but also used to the point of track and station saturation).

Anyway, one possibility many people ignore unfairly (in my opinion) for longer routes are night trains: you might arrive on the same day, but modern night trains often offer a hotel-quality accommodation, so I will be there in the morning, rested, and the time I've spent on the train will be time I'm sleeping anyway - so in many ways the trip actually would take less time than for an airplane or fast rail. And it's far more energy efficient as well.

Night trains are great, but only when it's an option. In France, they are basically limited to the south nowadays, when just a few years back at least some used to run up to here, in the west. Most non-HSR offers are being squeezed, seemingly to orient people towards the more lucrative HSR trains.

575km/h is hardly the peak speed of "normal" trains, V150 was a custom trainset (higher than normal power output, AGV bogies on a POS trainset and 3 cars to the standard 8) and running on a prepared track (increased catenary mechanical tension to handle the speed, and increased voltage from the standard 25kV to 31kV for increased power)

Also note that the MLX01 demonstrator (a better equivalent to the customized trainset used in the TGV record) has reached 581km/h. It's also done so on the 42km Yamanashi Maglev Test Line where V150's run took a ~140km section of (non-test) track.

It's only going to be ready by 2045? Won't better tech be developed in that timeframe making this train obsolete?

The core of today's HST tech dates back to the 50s (the 0-series Shinkansen, the latest of which was only retired in 2008, went in service in 1964).

And the first section of Chūō Shinkansen should be open in 2027, with partial opening possible as soon as 2020.

FWIW, even standard (non-maglev) high-speed rail construction are not short-term projects, the 300km LGV Est Phase 1 took 5 years between the initial earthworks and the line's opening and France isn't exactly as mountainous as Japan.

It takes time to vet, test, and build things, especially when representative government and massive land usage planning is involved. Much of the tech in modern airplanes is still from the 1950s and 1960s. The tech developed in the 2020s and 2030s will be in the trains of the 2050s-60s.

2045 is only ~30 years from now, and part of the line will be operational by 2027. It seems like a long time for people used to computer technology, but it's a typical generational cycle for industrial technology.

The 787, for example, which is just trickling into fleets now, was in development since the late 1990's (15 years ago). Power technology has developed even more slowly. E.g. the efficiency of coal power plants has only improved by about a factor of two in the last century or so. Heck, even computer technology is progressing more slowly these days. E.g. I wouldn't call Win2k obsolete, but it's 13 years old now!

So yes, the train will be a bit behind the state of the art by the time it's released, but it won't be obsolete.

The real thing is that they already have the train? It would seem they need to solve a few problems and scale up their track.

It just seems so foreign to work on something that you might not get to see operational in your lifetime :(

You have no patience. Plus you could just sign up for cryonics.

Do you own stock in a cryonics firm?

Actually the 787 was officially started in 2003. But these planes are better known technology.

The price and time-line estimate make me sad and pessimistic for some reason. 30 years and $90 billion just to pull a fast train line between two cities in Japan? How long and how expensive then will real futuristic projects be, like colonization of other planets, space elevators, fusion reactors and so on?

I wonder how much they're paying for land and tech development in that figure - doing something the first time is often rather expensive.

$90 billion is not a large sum of money, considering the pointless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan costed 3-4 TRILLION dollars. We could've had every major city connected to a maglev network by now if we didn't let politicians spend our tax money on bullshit.

Many space missions NASA designs are quite affordable, and the SpaceX innovations will make them even cheaper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War#...

I wish this mode of transportation would be practical and affordable here in the US. I like the light rail in Denver, and the subways in San Francisco. Made getting around town really easy and affordable. Unfortunately with the distance between cities here it is more practical to take a flight.

Depends on the cities. NY-SF by train will remain nonsense forever, but the eastern seaboard and a bunch of other clusters (LA-SF, Great Lakes stuff, I think the obama admin had a map of zones they wanted to put HSR proposals for a few years back) could be serviced by high-speed train, even more so with maglev (which extends the competitive range of train against plane)

My personal rule of thumb[0] is modern HSTs (280~320km/h top speed) are superior to plane up to ~1000km, and can remain competitive to 1500km.

(although, though that's much more of a personal advantage, having really shitty ears and great difficulty with pressure equalization the odd train tunnel — even at high speed — is much less painful than going from 0 to 30k ft and back)

[0] modulo specific settings, including the current security theater shit which I don't have to experience on train and considering that most of my experience is on european lines where city center to city center is what you want and airports are commonly 30~40mn away from city center

Even with the fact that planes fly slower now than in the 60s, I'll gladly fly DEN-SFO. I can be finishing dinner in Palo Alto when you're in the Salt Flats.

Unless it's raining/snowing/windy in Denver or SF (or even an unrelated location like Chicago or Boston which might prevent your aircraft from getting to DEN in the first place) in which case you might be sleeping in an airport terminal while masklinn is finishing a late supper in Palo Alto.

I write this as someone who has had two cancellations and 6 delays over ten air trips in the past three months.

And what are the stats for delays in mag-lev ecosystems? Given that you know how unreliable flight ecosystems are and can quantify the delays, I'm assuming you have a basis for comparison in making such a confident statement.

Holy Extrapolation Batman! Or, "We can estimate, using data from extant high-speed rail networks." I think you'll find that HSR generally has good on-time performance where it is not forced to share lines with freight trains (ie, not Amtrak). Since there are no mag-lev freight trains, and no plans to build any, it's reasonable to think that mag-lev trains would only be affected by weather in very extreme circumstances (not your run of the mill snow storm).

On a train, you could comfortably eat dinner on the way.

Not sure why you're replying to my comment, I noted the upper competitive range of HSR against plane — as far as I'm concerned — is 1500km with 1000km for superiority. Denver to SF is more than 2000km, it's way beyond what I consider competitive HSR ranges with current techs.

Spain has some security theater at their high speed trains but it is far less invasive than the one at airports. It is on the other hand even more useless since the security checks are not done at all stations. I have boarded AVE trains without passing a security check.

They had a high profile bombing at Madrid's Atocha train station (the day after one of my brothers was there, that one hit close to home, not that I expect security theater to make a difference).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

There are no security checks at the commuter trains (where the bombings happened) at Atocha or other stations (I traveled by commuter train from Atocha to Chamatrín a couple of months ago). The security checks are only for long distance trains at larger stations, so a terrorist can either just again bomb commuter trains or use the commuter train or bus to get to a small station and board the AVE there.

EDIT: Correction, I took the commuter train from Sol to Chamartín, so I do not actually know if there are security checks at the commuter trains at Atocha. But I assume not since it would not scale and there were no checks at the other stations.

The pressurization issue is no longer a problem - at least with the Japanese designs.

They run their tracks right next to each other, so trains are designed to not suffer major pressure changes from passing trains or tunnels.

Amtrak Hiawatha is an excellent and well-used "traditional" passenger rail line. Milwaukee<->Chicago in 91 minutes. Almost never late or slow, zero gate security or even ticket checks, convenient Passbook-compatible e-tickets checked by the conductor, comfortable seats, sufficient legroom, 110VAC at every window, takes you to the middle of Chicago with direct or easy access (> 3 bus stops) to every major CTA line and the Metra Electric.

The only things I'd really change are the price ($48 round-trip is a bit steep as a college student) and the lack of wi-fi. The vast majority of commuting professionals have cellular modems though.

It's really great to be able to move between cities in reasonable time without owning a car, buying gas and insurance, or trying to find somewhere to park for less than the price of a firstborn son anywhere useful in Chicago.

I've pulled out my iPhone speedometer app on the train and it clocks at around 80 in the middle of nowhere, 65ish in the northern Chicago suburbs.

The UK is also an example of effective, well-used conventional rail (up to 125 mph) in a densely populated region. It went downhill a bit after privatisation, but it's mostly recovered, and usage is high and increasing. There's now a high speed north-south line planned, because the busiest major route is soon going to be running at capacity.

On your personal advantage — most high speed train designs are pressure sealed nowadays, so there's even less than on conventional trains.

I wonder how fast they could make the train if it had the smaller cross-sectional area of the Hyperloop pods?

Another way to put it: What about a 310 mph maglev on a solar-panel shaded elevated track between SF and LA?

Even better, do away with MagLev altogether, and have them "float" the way an air hockey puck does.

(You have read Elon Musk's proposal, haven't you?)

I have, but I am thinking more steps ahead than you. The air bearings are at a bit of a disadvantage. There's less experience operating them for this purpose in the less controlled environment outside of an enclosed tube. Also, there's much more operational experience and existing R&D for mass transportation. Lastly, a smaller cross section would give the advantage of reduced drag. Though it would be larger than in the hyperloop case, it would be a lot smaller than the conventional train.

(Paid attention to basic economics, physics, and math, haven't you?)

When this baby his 93 mph, you're going to see some serious shit.

Good thing we're building a POS here in CA...

What's a Point of Sale system have to do with this train?

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