So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing.<p>The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment:<p>If California was a country it would be the world's fifth largest economy. It has a number of large and successful cities and areas connected along the coastline. San Diego, Orange County, LA, San Francisco. Why on earth isn't there a high speed rail between these cities? Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins? LA to San Fran in an hour and a half?<p>I took the train once from Irvine to Los Angeles and felt I had gone back in time to 1980. This in one of the richest counties in the world (OC). It's unthinkable in the year 2019, that we are all stuck on roads like I5 and 405, stuck in traffic for hours trying to make it to LA and the alternative is an ancient train trundling along at 50mph.<p>I hate the fact that an autocratic and repulsive Government is showing up the US in terms of green tech investment and high tech public transport systems, while the US govt is dropping taxes for the biggest companies and lowering spending on infrastructure and public works. This is guaranteed to have a terrible knock on effect over the next 20 years while the US is stuck with an old fashioned and clogged up transit system, polluted cities, and a dependence on fossil fuels.
I’m not sure if it’s just lost in translation, but Wuhan to Guangzhou isn’t even 1000 km so I don’t know where they get the 2200 km they’re quoting. That’s likely a figure for GZ to Beijing.<p>I have used the high speed line between Wuhan and GZ (and through to HK) several times. It’s currently a 4.5 hour direct journey (once per day) or a 5 hour journey if you change at GZ or Shenzhen. The HSR is 300ish km/h at the moment and that route stops about 4-5 times along the way, off memory.<p>Aside, I also don’t know how much benefit 1000 km/h travel would bring. That’s an enormous energy requirement to accelerate up to such a speed only to stop 4-5 times along the way. 600 km/h would likely be much more realistic, because if you shorten the duration too much you run into the wall of needing to accel/decel constantly to make the stops.<p>Lastly, the HSR there is already capable of 350 km/h at least, but they limited it to 300 km/h after a massive derailment that caused a heap of fatalities years ago and never increased it back up again. It may be reading into it too much, but it may also be telling that they didn’t see the benefit of upping the top speed again even when considering the loss of face.
1,000km/h is within what is conventionally considered transonic (965-1235km/h). I wonder how practical these speeds are without a containing tunnel, particularly on the ground where there is potential for damage to buildings, structures, wildlife, etc. from sonic booms. Additionally, as I understand it, reflecting objects and terrain at ground level increase the potential for generation of sonic booms at transonic speeds. Indeed, sonic booms are generated by trains today when going through tunnels where the air ahead of the train is constrained and compressed.
Has anyone else here ridden the maglev in Shanghai out of the airport? My 2c is that it was awesomely fast and convenient.<p>BUT, I was a little unnerved by how much the train jostled at some points. It was like the supports for the track had sunk in some places leading to the tracks no longer being aligned.<p>Not really informed by anything concrete, but I think there’s a disaster waiting to happen there. China has nowhere near the safety culture I’m used to in the states.<p>Now the conventional cars of the Shanghai metro? I really with the west coast of the US had infrastructure like that!
I used Google maps in the past days to marvel about Beijing’s new airport, Daxing. If you look closely you see the train tracks that are being built southbound. You see that they are mostly straight, mostly on stilts (still being built) but further south they also cross through some towns - where lines of houses have been removed. You can see several camps along the route, probably for construction workers to live directly by the construction site (some farmland had to go for that) - judging from the number of buildings it must be 1000s of them. Then, close to the end, you see massive construction work for what seems to become a major transportation hub, similar to the express train stations in Xi’an (8 million people) or Shanghai Hongqiao (220000 passengers/day). Yet, there isn’t much around it - a few smaller towns and villages. A bit further south the tracks seem to end north of the city of Xiong. The first trains are scheduled to be run in 2 years.<p>It’s a glimpse of the next project in preparation: the megacity of Xiong’an, which is to be built until 2050 to complement Beijing and Tianjin, totalling an area of about 110 million people.<p>This is all just very hard to fathom.
Im not sure anyone read this article through. It states an experimental 200km stretch of fullsize vacuum tubing is to be built by Hubei to validate low air resistance travel to 600/1000kph. The competition is the US/Germany and the build out will be in the next 10 years. So we are talking about hyperloops here..
A quick search shows hyperloop tt has 320m of 4m tubes and possibly by now a 1km section strung up on pylons for completion by end 2019 (in france).<p>Chinas maglev was a seimens tech transfer circa 2002, siemens / thyssenkrup disbanded their maglev company in 2008 after the munich line plan was abandoned.<p>So no one is interested in conventional maglevs, the cost per mile i imagine is not worth it. If you make it 1k kph however and reduce airport build spends this cost may change drastically.
If you can get your superconducter cooling sorted.
The headline should point out the train is in a vacuum tunnel.<p>It’s the same fundamental idea behind Hyperloop One and some of the other Hyperloop-related efforts, although of course the vacuum train concept has been around for a lot longer than since Elon Musk popularized it (And got a bunch of flak for doing so...).
I'm skeptical.<p>A 2200km vacuum tube, a 1000kph capable train. Theres a lot of things to go wrong, and if something goes wrong people die.<p>I don't doubt it's doable, I don't think it's practical though.<p>Has anyone done any research on sonic boom induced stress fractures on reinforced concrete vacuum tubes, or is that too niche?
> If technology proves to be viable, a 2,200-km trip from Wuhan to Guangzhou could be reduced to around two hours<p>Driving, this is only 984km. Shouldn't it be one hour?
This sounds like more of a hyperloop type thing than a traditional maglev train:<p>> if the concept of maglev trains swinging inside a vacuum tube can be put into practice<p>That means this will also have all the same problems as a hyperloop.
If they can get vacuum tubes working cost effectively that would be amazing, no limit to max speeds then. I doubt they are practical currently. Low pressure Helium Oxygen mixture probably a better option, just enough Oxygen for humans to survive and enough Helium, for say 1/3 atmosphere pressure, would be far easier and cheaper to build/maintain and would still dramatically reduce friction/drag.
Based on current services, in China you can go twice as far in half the time:<p><pre><code> San Francisco - Los Angeles: 620 km, train time 9:00 hr
Beijing - Shanghai: 1,320 km, train time 4:30 hr
</code></pre>
Prices in China are slightly higher:<p><pre><code> San Fran - LA: $53 lowest; $65 average
Beijing - Shanghai: $80 (553 CNY)
</code></pre>
Averaged for $/km CHina would be 20-35% cheaper.<p><a href="https://www.wanderu.com/en-us/train/us-ca/los-angeles/us-ca/san-francisco/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wanderu.com/en-us/train/us-ca/los-angeles/us-ca/...</a><p><a href="https://www.chinahighlights.com/china-trains/beijing-shanghai-train.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.chinahighlights.com/china-trains/beijing-shangha...</a>
> Also, a China Railway Group engineer told Changjiang Daily that Japan, Germany and the US were also competing against China, trialing their respective ultrafast maglev trains based on various models of the superconducting maglev technology.<p>Uh, we are? I don't know of any successful maglev projects ongoing in the United States.<p>And this is awful. Planes pollute so much [1] and the experience of flying is awful.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-of-travel/a-45209552" rel="nofollow">https://www.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-o...</a>
They are absolutely unstoppable right now in the infrastructure industry. And not just in their own country, but even world-wide (except the western world). They are building train tracks EVERYWHERE.
I still think the US has hope for rail and high speed rail that won’t bankrupt everyone. If, and this is a huge if (bc people love their cars), the US can replace a lane or two of major highways between cities with a rail. This would avoid forcing people to leave their homes or have massive payouts for stubborn landowners. The highway infrastructure is a pretty reasonable layer to build on as many highways already take close to the hypotenuse between major cities.<p>Anybody know why this concept isn’t talked about more?
Sadly, China has already wasted too much money on the so called high speed rails running at 300-350km per hour.<p>I was looking at my HSR options from Shanghai to Xi'an (1,500km distance) yesterday, the fastest train takes almost 6 hours and there is only one everyday. That 6 hours ride costs me almost $100 USD while $120 USD can covers my flight to Xi'an in 2.5 hours and I can choose the time of my flight. $20 extra to save 3.5 hours - the maths here is not hard.
This sort of stuff is impossible in a modern democracy where citizens and opposing interests have too much power to shoot down, infinitely delay or indefinitely increase costs of major infrastructure activities by litigation/protests/lobbying, etc.<p>Modern democracies simply cannot do large-scale infrastructure.
The benefits of projects like this always seem to quote how massive distances can be covered in a few hours. In this case it’s a 2200km journey being done in 2 hours.<p>That is of course amazing, but doesn’t seem very impactful to boring people like me. I’d be much more excited about my 30 mile train journey being over in 5 minutes instead of 45.<p>Even that seems selfish. Wouldn’t it be more exciting to have trains that carried 10x as many passengers, reducing fares by massive amounts?<p>Who is pushing for raw speed over throughput?
how fast the risk rate and dangerosity increases with speed ?<p>I applaud fast train projects, but I'm just curious about how nasty can things go if something fails at 1000km/h. Is it fully passive failure design ?
Hasn't the last 50 years of attempting these shown that they're uneconomic in the extreme, and probably will continue to be even if China puts its admittedly heavily state-subsidized rail-building prowess behind it?
Seems like an extremely expensive vanity project. Is that wise for a middle income country where hundreds of millions of people live in abject poverty?
A train at M0.8 near ground level? The very first derailing/crash/etc will demonstrate quite well why this is a poor idea. Planes are quite far from anything easily damageable when they go this fast.