Maglev Trains: Why This ALWAYS Falls Short

so in theory they're an Earth shaking invention a futuristic Wonder train that could reshape what it means to Traverse the world we live in floating on Dual sets of electromagnets constrained in their speed only by the constraints of the track they're built on and the people inside them the concept of the maglev train is a longtime favorite of ambitious engineers and star eyed futurists and for good reason if gotton right if implemented at Broad scale the maglev could reshape our entire worlds and entirely for the best better so why is it that in all the world today after an entire century plus of devoted Research into the concept there are just six maglev strains in operation for a design that captures the imagination better than almost any other the maglev has fallen Miles and Miles short of its fullest potential and on today's episode of Mega projects we're going to find out why [Music] [Music] okay now before we dig into the engineering and practical feasibility of the magl we're going to start with a science lesson now of course we're not going to go terribly deep on the final points of the physics here but for those magl enthusiasts watching I'm sure you're going to fill us in in the comments below look at a basic level maglevs short for magnetic levitation trains do exactly what what they are described to do they levitate because of magnets any magnetic pole whether it be in a deposit of iron or Cobalt or specially designed household or industrial magnets or even just in the front of your fridge is going to attract magnets that are opposite to it and repel or push away magnets that are like it it's a simple enough principle and to illustrate it practically we can imagine an entire table made up of magnetic surface say you were to drop a metal sphere of an opposite magnetic polarity that sphere will smack into the table with some pretty extreme enthusiasm and it'll be pretty difficult to remove it afterwards but if you drop a metal sphere that has the same polarity as the table it will actually end up floating because not only is it being held up and away from the magnet directly underneath it but whenever it tries to fall to one side it's basically falling onto other magnets that are also keeping it in the air now this is a pretty straightforward concept you're probably not struggling to wrap your head around it and the idea that this principle could be used for transport and specifically for trains has been around for a really long time indeed during the early 1900s American inventor Robert Godard and French American engineer Emil bashet both seriously consider the concept and its theoretical applications for a few key reasons you see when an ordinary train rolls on Wheels along a stretch of train tracks it's constantly dealing with friction from the rails which of course slows it down it's also got to maintain balance if you get a train going too fast and then it hits a curb too fast a whole lot of people are going to have a really bad day but these problems are alleviated when we consider the maglev now there's a few variations on maglev technology and we'll get into detail in just a moment but imagine as an example a single monal that's covered in electromagnets the surface isn't magnetic if the power is Switched Off but as soon as someone turns it on the rail begins to exert a powerful magnetic force on any other magnetic surfaces that surround it so we've got our rail let's add our train and it will feature a design on the bottom that allows it to wrap around the monil in a sort of C shape the monal too is covered in electromagnets and they've got the same polarity as the rail meaning that these magnets don't want to be touching each other use a powerful enough magnet and you can hold the entire train floating in midair and once it's levitating the train can move very very fast using the same amount of energy that it would take to move an ordinary train much much slower after all there is no friction and in a purely hypothetical sense this train could also turn and stop much more easily than one that's traveling on traditional Railways that a powerful enough magnet directly in front of the train and it will not matter how fast you drive that train straight at that magnet they are not going to touch now obviously this would be really bad for anybody inside the train or any of the loose objects that would crash into whatever's in front of them but even if a magav was somewhat toned down to be a bit less ridiculous it would still be a major Improvement on any of the Railway trains that are currently in use ever feel like you're juggling a thousand things at once yes maybe look life's busy that's where today's sponsor comes in today's sponsor is Squarespace Squarespace makes it a breeze to create a beautiful website just like I did despite the Whirlwind of tasks and responsibilities that everybody seems to have Squarespace as many incredible features but there are a few standouts first of all 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got the science sort of decently under control let's dig into the specifics behind what a magv actually looks like now there are two basic types of magv that people know how to build electromagnetic suspension which is pretty similar to the system that we just described and electrodynamic suspension first there's electromagnetic suspension or EMS EMS uses a train and a guideway or a monor rail both of which are coated with electromagnets that lift the train about half an inch or just over a centimeter over the guideway this kind of system has one major benefit that electrodynamic suspension doesn't specifically that it elevates the train off the track even when the train is stationary or at rest the only thing that would cause the train to touch the track is if the electromagnets were shut off entirely this means that EMS star tracks can be simple the trains can be very sleek and although early theorists on these sorts of designs had a lot of concerns about train stability there are ample measures to deal with stability concerns in the modern day okay so then there's electrodynamic suspension this is where a train isn't situated around a monoral at all but instead it rests on a guideway that includes a flat bottom and walls on either side here it is the walls that emit a magnetic force toward the train with the bottom of the walls designed to push the train upward and have it float at the furthest point between either wall basically in the center of the track in this case it's about 4 cm off the ground the higher section of the walls are built to attract or pull the train toward both sides that once further stabilizing the train in the center of the track now of course the trains are made with more than strong enough material so as to not split down the middle which would probably again lead to many people having a really bad day all right so there are a number uh variations on electrodynamic suspension or EDS but the basic idea is the same it keeps the train floating at the center of a corridor rather than just pushing it upward and away from a single track EDS has a major disadvantage though which is that at slower speeds the walls don't exert enough magnetic flux to make the train levitate but this can be solved by giving the train wheels or other gear which will eventually lift off the ground when the train goes fast enough EDS also creates a bit more drag for reasons that we don't need to get into and because of the way the magnetic field works hard drives credit cards or even pacemakers would be rendered inoperable unless the train is magnetically shielded this sort of shielding is possible it's just really really expensive we should also mention really briefly that there's also a third sort of design that uses permanent magnets ones that don't turn off and on but this design is far less developed and then there's the question of propulsion this works mostly the same way regardless of what sort of magav train we're talking about and the critical thing to understand is that a maglif train does not have an engine at least not like other vehicles and rail proportion systems it also doesn't say get pulled Along by a winch or pushed Along by a giant fan or a jet engine or any of the things that might seem like they make sense to power a floating train instead Mages are propelled by yet more magnets coordinating ated to turn on and off at just the right time to pull or push the train in a certain direction this erases a number of issues around highp speed travel specifically around getting a powerful enough engine onto a train to make it go at the speeds that a magb could potentially hit and well talking about speeds well what are they try about 500 km or 310 mph that's more than half the speed of a commercial jetliner with all the advantages of rail travel and then some and even those high speeds they're merely a fraction of what is possible if Engineers don't have to worry about things like say Curves in the track or the physical limitations of the humans riding on board stupid weak humans conceivably a magb train can float through the air as fast as you can coordinate magnets to push it along and with the current magf speed record already set at 601 km an hour that's 374 mil per hour forward is still very much emerging technology it's safe to say that the Design's upper most limit is probably far far beyond that now as for actually building a maglev train the technology also provides some other key advantages compared to regular rail travel because the entire train is just floating often in enclosed tunnels it should typically experience only very limited wear and tear meaning that repairs and parts Replacements happen less frequently it's also highly unlikely that a magav train would derail and they aren't subject to any of the same restrictions on width that a rail car would need to be in order to balance on its tracks the trains also don't burn any fuel and the ride is both quiet and smooth due again so what should be a near complete lack of friction finally magl trains can handle far more significant slopes upward than a traditional Railway train making them significantly more practical in hilly areas or for quick transitions from above ground stations to Subterranean [Music] travel okay so as state-ofthe-art as it may seem the first commercial maglev actually went into development decades ago when in 1984 a low-speed magav opened up at a short route between the UK's Birmingham international railway station and the Birmingham International Airport the Birmingham magav train ran for about 11 years buying people across a stretch of track that went only for about 600 M it was a far cry from anything the more starry-eyed maglab enthusiasts would imagine but it was a cool little thing in its own right and proved to be pretty popular with its passengers unfortunately it was made obsolete before long and its magnetic systems were plagued with so many problems that by 1995 the whole thing was closed down and replaced with a uh with a bus but the first commercial high-speed maglev wouldn't come about for another 20 years after the humble Birmingham line when it did it showed up across the world in the city of Shanghai China designed by several German companies and capable of carrying passengers of 430 km an hour 268 m per hour it provided a very smooth quiet rid that took 8 minutes to complete going from the Shanghai Financial District to the pong International Airport that same ride takes about 50 minutes by taxi though the Shanghai maglev operated only three trains of five cars each every train could carry as many as 574 passengers and because of the very short span of track those trains were able to complete shuttle runs every 10 minutes with the capacity to transport 10 million passengers a year the price for that 8 Minute magav was the equivalent of 1.2 bill billion in 1995 money closer to $2 billion today and across the world Germany took its best attempt at an early maglev design in 1991 with a train that it referred to as the magnet Barn meant to travel a mile or 1.6 km in a section of Berlin that had been divided by the Berlin Wall it was able to hit 80 km per hour between its three stations but sadly it was victim of poor timing by the time it opened the Berlin Wall had fallen meaning that there was no need for a magb in the first place predictably it closed just a year later Japan's linimo maglev opened nearly two decades ago and is currently serving its local community after some early Fanfare in the Expo 2005 and it's been lucky enough to stay open but it too is not a high-speed train topping out at just 100 km per hour and featuring nine stops on its 9 km Journey South Korea's aota maglev in the city of ton does about the same thing and the inan airport maglev also in South Korea runs at just over 6 km in length with a top speed of 80 km an hour China's Chang sha maglev and S1 line in Beijing are both low speed maglabs as well making them well just no more impressive and believe it or not that is the exhaustive list of all the maglevs that have ever existed in commercial use and even Beyond the Lines that did get completed the average turnaround time between ambitious magl proposal and quiet cancellation has been pretty short take for example the Swiss Metro a project that had hoped to bring every Swiss City within 15 minutes travel of all the others the Swiss Metro intended to use Sleek he speed trains in excess of 500 km per hour sealed in vacuum or near vacuum tunnels between 50 and 100 m underground but given how the proposal would have cost 24 billion Franks it was ultimately and predictably abandoned so too was the situation for the Munich magb estimated at a length of 38 km from airport to city center but cancelled after its costs nearly doubled a plan's nearly 300 km track from Berlin to Hamburg travs B in just 55 minutes was green lit in 1994 but canceled in 2000 when everybody realized that a somewhat slower new train would be cheaper and the Metro rapid plans between dorf and Dortmund faced massive public backlash and questions over whether a high-speed maglev really matters at all if it's got to stop almost a dozen times over the course of its journey and lest you worry that only Germany and Switzerland learned their maglab lessons the hard way well there's no need to worry in the United States a maglab between the cities of Baltimore and Washington DC went down the tubes in 2002 after public officials learned the hard ways that midat antic Suburban residents didn't love the idea of their neighborhoods being demolished in order to get a fast train the cost was also a major issue projected it up to $4 billion even before construction would have started and over half of that money was expected to come from non-government sources the city of Pittsburgh tried to get their own design funded with the intent of bringing people from the airport of the city center but as any current resident of Pittsburgh will tell you the closest thing you can get to maglev travel in the traffic clogged city is to just run really quickly similar projects in California went the same way even a low-speed magb intended for Old Dominion University in norfol Virginia was recently demolished after its tracks set abandoned for 20 years cancelled after $6 million were already spent building an insanely elaborate means of taking students across the campus $16 million so that basically sums up the state of the modern maglev industry one highspeed version and a handful of lowp speed trads that basically do the same job as a traditional rail line using maglev technology for no other reason that it seems like it's really cool by now it should be fairly clear that a few major factors crop up time and time again in order to stand in the way of maglev projects they massive cost and frequent budget overruns public blowback against building on specific routes and the simple reality that if you're just after a high-speed commuter train making a multi-stop trip a magb simply isn't that much better than just a regular ass train but there is one more factor that we've got to touch on in order to fully flesh out why there's so much hesitancy around maglevs the laan transrapid Collision which occurred in a small town in Germany in 2006 at a maglev testing facility in laan the transrapid maglev company had been testing their trains on a 31 km 19m track where the company had been working for years on trains that were supposed to be used in the maglev projects that we described prior because magav trains quite literally cannot collide with each other again magnets doing magnetic things transrapid had long made a habit of offering tickets to the public for test runs with up to a th000 visitors a day but on September the 22nd 2006 a Communications failure during a standard test run caused trans Rapids test train to crash into a stationary maintenance parked further down the track that hadn't got a permission to turn off the main track and go into its storage shed at a speed of 162 km/ hour 101 mph the magl impacted the maintenance car leaving 23 magl passengers dead while 10 people including the two in the maintenance car survived with significant injuries it was a tragic accident one caused by clear failures by the test facility's dispatchers and employees rather than by any failure of maglev technology itself but nonetheless the incident was so shocking that it forced the end of the trans rpid company the cancellation of nearly every maglev transrapid was supposed to work on and it shook public confidence in maglev technology so s verely that the entire industry was set back decades but after that somber episode it's probably best to balance out with a little bit of good news and luckily we do have some of that to share as well magf projects may be developing at a snail's pace but even snails do get somewhere eventually and in the early 2020s it appears that maglev technology is starting to do the same for the day's first bit of optimism we're going to head over to the city of Ching da in China where in 2021 a magav produced by China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation snagged the title of the fastest train on Earth capable of hitting speeds as high 600 km or 373 mph the Ching da maglev is reportedly very quiet and easily maintained and as of now China plans to take this successful prototype and build a network of maglev lines to run it also in China links between Shanghai and hhho and between Chang duu and Chongqing are reportedly under construction and then there's the Northeast maglab in the US which still hopes to construct a high-speed rail connection between Washington DC and Baltimore before extending North to New York City and transforming a 4-Hour drive into a 1-hour maglab trip in a project that continues to Garner significant financial support from the Japanese government Northeast maglev is also projected to need some six or seven years to build its train once it gets the go-ahead meaning that if everything came together for the project tomorrow the magav still wouldn't be available until 2030 and it still needs to get approval from dozens of agencies before it does but even though area residents are cynical around whether the project will actually happen it's not been given up on lastly there's the Cho shanen a maglev line currently under construction and expected to run between the Japanese cities of Tokyo and ngoya with a planned 285 km initial track that would include nine stops The Cho shinkansen is projected to H speeds of 505 km or 340 mph the line has been under construction since 2014 with commercial service projected to begin as soon as 2027 although red tape issues in one of the prefectures the maglev would run through has given some cause for concern The Cho shinkansen faces a few obstacles before it's completed not least the risk of building an underground maglev line in a seismically active area and while the tunnels for the maglev will be reinforced by the time the trains run through it the construction process will still be risky for workers at present the improved lzo series of maglev has been designed for the line and is undergoing regular testing at the choing Canon's test Loop so all things considered the magl has turned out to be an incredibly tough proposition to get from the technical challenges in making it work to the tremendous costs of building a line to questions on whether the maglev is even worth it at all in many countries even in China and Japan where they're most likely to be built on mass magl technology has largely Fallen by the wayside in favor of conventional High-Speed Rail networks in other nations though even regular High-Speed Rail has been an exceptionally daunting Challenge and if a country can't get that right it's going to be hard for them to turn around and deliver a maglev so until something changes it's entirely likely that the magav will remain a machine trapped mostly in the theoretical perhaps future success stories like the choin Canen or the Ching da maglev will change that if they can work well enough consistently enough to undo the bitter taste that magl proposals have left in many policy makers mouths or perhaps the high-speed trains of today and the hyper Loops of Tomorrow will simply do the same job better making the maglev redundant and obsolete for now though we simply have to wait and find [Music] [Music] out

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 243,749

Keywords: how many maglev trains does china have, maglev trains, how does maglev train work, china's shanghai maglev train, where does the maglev train run, future of transportation, what is the fastest maglev train, train fact, railway innovation, magnetic levitation, amazing fact, high speed rail, electromagnetic suspension, china train, world's fastest train, chinese train

Id: Fo0123oLKTA

Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023