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China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains
- gnode 7y ago1,000km/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.
- hojijoji 7y agoAt these speeds, the train would need to drive in a low pressure tunnel.
- NamTaf 7y agoIt’s worth noting that this isn’t necessarily that big of an issue for China. A lot of their HSR is grade-separated and not infrequently up on viaducts. It’s not a particularly big step in my mind to enclosing that.
- gnode 7y agoI'm not sure it's strictly necessary to have the tunnel be low pressure. It's nice for the sake of less resistance, but the speed of sound is actually lower at lower pressures, and so would more readily produce a sonic boom.
- jackyinger 7y agoHas anyone else here ridden the maglev in Shanghai out of the airport? My 2c is that it was awesomely fast and convenient. 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. 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. Now the conventional cars of the Shanghai metro? I really with the west coast of the US had infrastructure like that!
- briandear 7y agoI rode it ten years ago and it felt safe, I would be interested to know how safety would be for a 1000 mile trip where every inch of track couldn’t be controlled. An animal on the track, sabotage, ice, snow — there are a lot of factors that become very hard to control at those speeds and distances.
- simion314 7y ago>the safety culture I’m used to in the states. From the Boeing 747 MAX incidents you can conclude that if there is a big pile of money involved then safety is a problem to be workaround of, though funny enough there are still people that blame the cause on the safety regulations, like if the regulations were not present then Boeing and the free market (with only 2 competitors) would solve the issues
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- bsaul 7y agoRode it last year and it was fine. But i’m used to rail high-speed trains, so maybe that’s why i found it perfectly quiet and safe. Another reason could be that it wasn’t the time of the day when it goes up to max speed ( it only reaches 400km/h on certain time of the day, some days only. other time it’s just 350 or something like that)
- HenryKissinger 7y agoMeanwhile, in America...
- ailideex 7y agoIf you like China so much...
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoI mean yeah, the day after you get HSR, communist government materialises out thin air!
- HenryKissinger 7y agoI'm not a fan of regimes that concentrate religious minorities in camps, enforce an ideological form of social engineering through "social credit", harvest organs on an industrial scale, or disappear people for having views out of step with dear leader Winnie the Pooh. Rather, I feel a profound sense of disappointment at the sight of an America that used to move mountains and earth to improve the human condition, and, at a time of historically unprecedented aggregate wealth, productivity, and technological advancement, finds itself unable or unwilling to commit itself to the sorts of enterprises that less fortunate nations have no problem undertaking.
- StreamBright 7y agoThis is partially because the improvements you mention come from the private sector while the things that you miss usually done by government (at the very least the framework). US has a long history of crony capitalism or corporatism and as a result no real general public health care, public transportation and so on. It also does not help that different states have different regulations in many cases.
- KoftaBob 7y agoThis is a horrible attitude to have. You're telling them that rather than push their country to be the best it can be, they should accept it for what it is and move if they don't like it? That's not what America is about my friend.
- geogra4 7y agoAs fast as a jetliner, and way more efficient. Can be powered without fossil fuels. This is the future. Where is America on HSR?
- ulfw 7y agoWorking as hard as it can to find excuses not to build any
- kiba 7y agoBusy with environmental impact statements and lawsuits.
- uptown 7y agoThis feed should give you some indication: https://twitter.com/metronorth https://twitter.com/metronorth We're struggling with rain and leaves.
- vonmoltke 7y agoHere's a better one: https://twitter.com/FuckNjTransit https://twitter.com/FuckNjTransit
- meerita 7y agoIsn't Tesla working on Ultra-Fast 'Hyperloop' Trains?
- ju577ry 7y agoAmerican here. Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.
- supernova87a 7y agoHasn'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?
- justinzollars 7y agoThey are amazing. There is one in Shanghai that connects the airport to the city. Imagine a ride from SFO to Salesforce tower in 7 minutes.
- brandmeyer 7y agoIts also a money pit. They keep it running as a matter of nationalistic pride, not because its economical. Most folks in the area take the ordinary metro to the airport, not the maglev.
- gok 7y agoThe Shanghai Airport Maglev was built by a German company trying to prove the concept for longer distance maglev construction. It was a failure; it was way too expensive and not meaningfully faster than conventional high speed rail.
- briandear 7y agoThat use case is perfect for Maglev. Essentially replace Caltrain.
- justinzollars 7y ago^ This guy has an imagination! This is what I like to see on HN. positive about technology. Thank you.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoIt doesn’t really go to the city, but some far out suburb in pudong. Faster to take a cab than subway + maglev transfer. Unless you specifically want to ride the maglev.
- justinzollars 7y agoAnd San Francisco is struggling to add 1 mile of underground track. The project is postponed (again) to open in 2022.
- OrgNet 7y agothey are also struggling to build enough homes for everyone, aren't they?
- StreamBright 7y agoOnly, if you classify NIMBY struggling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
- OrgNet 7y agoI do...
- martinald 7y agoAdd to that estimates of second avenue subway phase 2 coming in at $10bn for 2miles of track. Not sustainable.
- cabaalis 7y agoBe careful comparing a system which can simply take the land and labor it wants to one in which people have rights.
- arghwhat 7y agoYes, such a land compares poorly to China. /s
- mikepurvis 7y agoLand and labour get taken from plenty of Americans too— it's just usually for the benefit of wealthy private corporations rather than to advance a public good such as dignified, quality, low carbon mass transportation. https://money.cnn.com/2005/06/23/news/fortune500/retail_eminentdomain/ https://money.cnn.com/2005/06/23/news/fortune500/retail_emin... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prisoner-speak-out-american-slave-labor-strike https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prison...
- 20190820234322 7y agodang, can we ban this account? It looks very suspicous (posting a lot of pro-China stuff, username, etc.)
- StreamBright 7y agoThat is going to be the last day I use HN. I think this comment above just shows the intolerance of some people here who are yelling for moderation and unwilling to debate anything that is slightly against their worldview.
- quaquaqua1 7y agoI said the same thing years ago yet I keep coming back for the helpful information. I simply ignore posts like these 99% of the time.
- i_cant_speel 7y agoI see two posts that can be construed as pro-China within the last year (This being one of them).
- 20190820234322 7y agoI count at least three. No way this isn't an shill account.
- quaquaqua1 7y agoThree posts about a large country constitutes a "shill account"? How does one even define "shill account"? Does the same standard apply to posts about USA or companies?
- 20190820234322 7y agoOf course the same standards do not apply. People living under democratic regimes can be assumed to have formed their views independently on their own, and to be speaking on their own behalf. People living totalitarian regimes cannot be treated as free-acting agents.
- devicetray0 7y ago> If technology proves to be viable, a 2,200-km trip from Wuhan to Guangzhou could be reduced to around two hours Driving, this is only 984km. Shouldn't it be one hour?
- mikepurvis 7y agoSlowing down and stopping for intermediate stations?
- arnvald 7y agoI think that's a typo and they mean a trip from Beijing to Guangzhou
- LeonM 7y ago1000km/h is the maximum velocity of the train (Vmax), it's cruising speed will probably be lower. You also need to accelerate and decelerate, so the average speed (Vavg) will be much lower than 1000km/h.
- NamTaf 7y agoYeh they quoted the wrong number.
- ChrisAntaki 7y agoWith train speeds potentially doubling, will wait times for organ transplants in China reduce even further? https://www.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-uighur-muslims-china-tribunal-tells-un-2019-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...
- holstvoogd 7y agowell, atleast they can deport the Uighur faster :/
- ChrisAntaki 7y agoSeriously, I mean these trains might be impressive from an engineering point of view, but they will be used to violate human rights. If calling that out leads to downvotes and lost Hacker News "karma", then what was that "karma" even worth?
- 20190820234322 7y agoHN is at least 50% Chinese shill accounts these days, thanks to the swarms of tech people with direct or direct connection to that country.
- kwizzt 7y agoI think you are getting down voted because your reply is not relevant to the topic. Not because of other reasons.
- dang 7y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jdm2212 7y agoThis sounds like more of a hyperloop type thing than a traditional maglev train: > if the concept of maglev trains swinging inside a vacuum tube can be put into practice That means this will also have all the same problems as a hyperloop.
- simion314 7y agoMaybe they plan a hybrid, so the same train will travel on regular and tunneled tracks. Though I was expecting that new materials and design could reduce the air friction even more in the future.
- saberience 7y agoSo, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing. 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: 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? 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. 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.
- intopieces 7y ago>Why on earth isn't there a high speed rail between these cities? The cost of labor, the cost of environmental studies, the cost of materials, and the need for the project to show a profit. All of these factors are much different in China.
- 0xcafecafe 7y agoWhat is the cost of riding one of these?
- NamTaf 7y agoThe current HSR from Wuhan to HK is USD $96/$154/$298 for 2nd/1st/business class seats respectively. It’s all price regulated, so that’s the cost for every train on that route, every day. You can search here for other combos: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/China-trains/ https://www.travelchinaguide.com/China-trains/
- dis-sys 7y agoSadly, China has already wasted too much money on the so called high speed rails running at 300-350km per hour. 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.
- _ph_ 7y agoI don't think any traffic network is ever wasted, as traffic seems to perpetual grow, especially in countries with a strongly growing economy. A long-distance maglev wouldn't make the HSR redundant. Having two train systems increases the total transport capacity and the HSR would be more for shorter and medium distances while the maglev could limit to long distance connections. Any cities in between would connect via HSR to the maglev.
- gkanai 7y agoDomestic flights in China are often delayed due to weather or congestion in route because the People's Liberation Army Air Force control the airspace too tightly. Shanghai-Beijing HSR takes longer than air flight but in certain times of year, when delays are common, HSR can be competitive, plus you are online the entire time.
- NamTaf 7y agoI’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. 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. 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. 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.
- usrusr 7y ago> only to stop 4-5 times along the way That's the big one. What HSR needs is not even higher top speed but some control breakthrough that allows much higher train frequencies in order to cut down on stops via more trains that can serve more specialized connections (e.g. the local/through etc). No idea what that breakthrough might be, perhaps something as crazy as rocket-assisted emergency braking.
- benibela 7y agothis for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Ig19gYP9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Ig19gYP9o
- bob1029 7y agoWhy not aero braking? You could install little flaps actuated with hydraulics along the train. This could probably be part of the normal braking system. The amount of drag produced by something like this at 1000kmh would likely be very substantial.
- baxtr 7y agoFun fact: they bought the first trains from Germans for a short track
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- garyclarke27 7y agoIf 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.
- smiley1437 7y agoIsn't helium potentially in short supply? https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/helium-smartphones-fibre-optic-cable-mri-internet-scuba-1.5084212 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/helium-smartphones-fibre-op... Pressurizing train tunnels with significant amounts of helium which would constantly need to replenished may be impractical
- scarejunba 7y agoThat's just temporary shocks. We have lots of Helium available should we increase use.
- benj111 7y agoI'm skeptical. A 2200km vacuum tube, a 1000kph capable train. Theres a lot of things to go wrong, and if something goes wrong people die. I don't doubt it's doable, I don't think it's practical though. Has anyone done any research on sonic boom induced stress fractures on reinforced concrete vacuum tubes, or is that too niche?
- golemiprague 7y agoFor most people the issue is not high speed train but rather suburban and inner city transportation. For 1k km we can take a flight, but there is a lot to be done for 100km radius type of transportation and that's what we should focus on.
- agumonkey 7y agohow fast the risk rate and dangerosity increases with speed ? 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 ?
- qwerty456127 7y agoWhy? Why would anybody build trains like that instead of adopting the hyperloop technology which is faster, much more cheap and more safe?
- detaro 7y agoWhy do you think "hyperloop technology" would be "faster, much more cheap and more safe"?
- kurtisc 7y agoThese are maglev trains in vacuum tubes. What's the difference?
- qwerty456127 7y agoOk then, I've missed this point. Nevertheless, I thought maglev (as well as high-speed rail) hardware is rater complex and expensive.
- dmitrygr 7y agoA 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.
- Robotbeat 7y agoIt’s in a vacuum tunnel. Basically like the Hyperloop One idea.
- dmitrygr 7y agoAll the more fun to be had when it cracks/is terrorist-attacked/is subject to an earthquake.
- Robotbeat 7y agoI never understood this argument. The same vulnerability exists with regular high speed rail. In fact... Since it’s protected by a thick steel tube, it’s harder to do that than with a regular Maglev. Leaks take much longer to depressurize a vacuum than you might think and would help slow the vehicle down.
- Robotbeat 7y agoThe headline should point out the train is in a vacuum tunnel. 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...).
- lacampbell 7y agoSeems like an extremely expensive vanity project. Is that wise for a middle income country where hundreds of millions of people live in abject poverty?
- throwawayjohnny 7y agoWho'd they steal it from this time?
- echelon 7y ago> 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. Uh, we are? I don't know of any successful maglev projects ongoing in the United States. And this is awful. Planes pollute so much [1] and the experience of flying is awful. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-of-travel/a-45209552 https://www.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-o...
- gorgoiler 7y agoThe 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. 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. Even that seems selfish. Wouldn’t it be more exciting to have trains that carried 10x as many passengers, reducing fares by massive amounts? Who is pushing for raw speed over throughput?
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- xvilka 7y agoI think even Africa will have better passenger low speed and a high speed train systems sooner than US, if US will ever have them.
- redblacktree 7y agoCan we call them 1 megameter/hour trains?
- breakerbox 7y agoI 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. Anybody know why this concept isn’t talked about more?
- beerandt 7y agoIt doesn't work like that- the geometric design of high speed rail and interstate highways are significantly different. The same is true for heavy rail vs high speed rail. You need much larger curves, and much smaller gradients for high speed rail. Also clear space requirements for interstates would likely be infringed, which is one of the biggest factors of safety. A more workable approach would be to reclaim abandoned rail ROW, and purchased additionally required ROW to extend curve length, where required. However much of this ROW has already been reclaimed by landowners and built upon.
- justanotherjoe 7y agoThey 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.
- choonway 7y agothe solution? buy over a plot of land 1km x 1km and build a building 1km high. That should be enough space to cover everything.
- nec4b 7y agoWhy would anyone want to bother with trains if you can hop on an airplane for a lot cheaper and get to the destination faster?
- cmarschner 7y agoI 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. 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. This is all just very hard to fathom.
- lenkite 7y agoThis 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. Modern democracies simply cannot do large-scale infrastructure.
- CRUDite 7y agoIm 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). Chinas maglev was a seimens tech transfer circa 2002, siemens / thyssenkrup disbanded their maglev company in 2008 after the munich line plan was abandoned. 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.
- mikhailfranco 7y agoBased on current services, in China you can go twice as far in half the time: San Francisco - Los Angeles: 620 km, train time 9:00 hr Beijing - Shanghai: 1,320 km, train time 4:30 hr Prices in China are slightly higher: San Fran - LA: $53 lowest; $65 average Beijing - Shanghai: $80 (553 CNY) Averaged for $/km CHina would be 20-35% cheaper. https://www.wanderu.com/en-us/train/us-ca/los-angeles/us-ca/san-francisco/ https://www.wanderu.com/en-us/train/us-ca/los-angeles/us-ca/... https://www.chinahighlights.com/china-trains/beijing-shanghai-train.htm https://www.chinahighlights.com/china-trains/beijing-shangha...