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Comment by arrrg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

> 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.

"Jets win everywhere else."

Of course they don't. Getting to an airport 60-90 minutes before a flight that's only 60-90 minutes doesn't make much sense

This is true.

But the requirement to arrive 90 minutes before departure time is not a problem with the vehicle but the bureaucracy and security apparatus around it.

True Story: while I like to arrive well before a flight (just in case) when I was younger it was not unheard of to arrive at the airport _minutes_ before flight departure and simply stroll down the causeway, and onto the flight.

I could walk into the heathrow terminal for edinburgh plonk down my card buy a ticket walk into the lounge have a quick pint and be on a plane to ediburgh within 15/20 min

Of course Heathrow itself is an hour from almost everywhere in central London, and Edinburgh Airport is 30 mins by road from Princes Street, so your 20 mins just became two hours.

hmm used to be 30 mins in a taxi to haethrow and the train journy takes 5 hours.

And the british airways cream tea was amazing as it should be for >£200

Did you even read my comment ? Jets will go WHERE the maglev trains won't, even if it's not that far.

You are being a bit vague. If I want to travel 60 miles, I'm not going to get on a jet. Do I want to get on a jet to travel 200 miles? What exact use case are you trying to describe? Also consider, for example, that a 777 needs a big airport.

This reminds me how once several years ago I had to fly MKE -> ORD -> LHR where the distance between MKE and ORD is about 70 miles. The MKE -> ORD flight was full by the way and it took ridiculous 2 hours to get there (from boarding to leaving the plane). I think I did it because the direct flight was several hundred $ extra and I happened to be in MKE area anyway.

All these scenarios don't matter because wherever you are going most of the time you won't have anything BUT a jet and not a maglev train to bring you there (because it will only connect 2 cities to each other, and you'll never map out the whole territory with maglev train lines due to their prohibitive cost). Unless you want to take you car.

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?

You could get a ballpark figure by looking at Crossrail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail

73 miles of track, 40 stations, 26 miles of tunnel under London. £16bn ($27bn-ish). So, for your project, I'd handwave at $1-5bn.

>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.

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.

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.

I've clocked Acela at just below 150mph on my GPS in between Providence and Boston. As I understand it, they would like to go faster in other sections, but the track / catenary isn't able to sustain that speed on most of the journey. Still way better than flying for BOS<->NYC or NYC<->WAS. It's a shame that the ticket prices are 2x what the regional is though.

Never heard about having dedicated rails. It would be nice, since the FRC requires any train that travels on track shared by freight to be basically built like a tank, which makes them much more expensive to make an operate.

Very sad since IIRC Acela was supposed to have its own high speed rail but runs on existing track due to budget

> and heading south the rail bridge that runs next to the Triborough gives you a fantastic panorama of Manhattan's east side.

For anyone else interested, that's the Hell Gate Bridge[0]. It's odd, I'm in the generation that will always think of the Triborough as the Triborough, not the RFK, the same way others still think Interboro, not Jackie Robinson.

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

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.

High speed rail is often implemented using dedicated track wherever possible - either brand new or upgraded and restricted to other traffic types:

A closely sitting and smooth train wheel gets damaged pretty quickly traveling on track that is accustomed to freight traffic. That now-damaged wheel then goes on to damage the polished high speed track, which then further damages other trains' wheels in a vicious circle.

China's new high speed train network, for example, is almost all dedicated track (a large part newly constructed routes) with existing track used only where there are space constraints (for example, a city centre station).

French TGV runs on a significative amount of non-highspeed track though, and it seems to work good enough (about the same speed as China's HSR, and it has been working for decades).

I understand the TGV uses weight limitation and careful scheduling to mitigate the cost of other traffic (both wear-and-tear and scheduling), and as in the case of China also has sections of line that are unavoidably mixed, but used, as cost effective alternatives are not attractive. And I think that's the crux: a trade-off between cost and benefit. A new high-speed line is still margins cheaper than a maglev, though that's not to say I'd not like to see maglevs.

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

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.

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.

The northeast is as dense as western Europe.

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.

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

And yet nowhere close to as dense as Japan.

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