Here's an experimental Japanese mag-lev train. Its indicated maximum speed of 504 kilometers per hour translates to 315 mph - and all without vibration or even much noise, thanks to the 'contactless' mag-lev system.
I'd love to go for a ride on that one. Looks more like an airliner inside than a train!
Peter
4 comments:
A lot of that was in tunnels, about the only way to ensure that some sort of foreign object(animal, thrown item tossed by a terrorist) won't lift this thing off the guide path and become airborne.
The cost of the "rail" is astounding per mile - Endless numbers of highly engineered magnetic coils fed my miles and miles of wire, supplying a huge amount of electrical power, controlled by a massive computer system that must have redundancy in spades.
Only a government can build and support these trains... and ours is broke and bankrupt.
A ticket to ride would be quite costly.
Other than an interesting science and engineering project, I see none of these trains running commercially for a long time... if ever.
You wouldn't want to be leaning your head against the window when two of them pass... Did that once on the Shinkansen and got the crap scared out of me!!! AND bounced my head to my other shoulder... :-)
This is the kind of thing that gives Jerry Brown wet dreams.
Antibubba
Remarkably enough, that speed has been exceeded by a steel-wheeled French TGV train running on a regular-line track (albeit one carefully prepped):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPfzWILDJ8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_world_speed_record
Peak speed in that clip was 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph), putting down 26,800 hp to the wheels. The train made the run with a full complement of engineers aboard monitoring the test. In the video, note the Learjet flying chase.
They do these high-speed runs every few years to push the envelope to see what is achievable, and the improvements are fed back into raising the regular in-service speeds.
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