Comments on Whatâ€™s a Gadgetbahn?

By: alfred

2019-12-19T18:03:50Z

The real problem with the shanghai Transrapid is that it goes straight to the middle of nowhere. and the Transrapid was more or less still in development when the Chinese got it.

Also I’d like to hear your thoughts on the Japanese SCmaglev.

By: Fraser Pollock

2018-01-18T18:10:10Z

High Speed transport is a wonderful thing! However, if you have ever been on a high speed train you notice a few things. First the trains actually travel at normal speeds inside the built up areas of large cities. Why? They do this is because of safety regulations and people have to live there close to these lines, so the noise level must be kept down.

Have you ever stood anywhere near a high speed railway vehicle right of way? I have stood underneath or near both High Speed Passenger Rail (HSR) lines and or a Maglev line with a train or vehicle traveling at or near there optimal cruse speeds, it’s very, very loud and uncomfortable due to the highly compressed air pressure wave caused by the passing vehicle! So much so, I can easily imagine most people really wouldn’t want to live near it if they didn’t had the choice to.

The Chinese High Speed Maglev line that runs to Shanghai’s International Airport travels through mainly but not entirely suburban and rural areas. The Germans had required a 300 metre wide (150 metres each side of the line) safety/security barrier around their high speed Maglev test line which was in a suburban area. This was needed because of the air blasts, noise and safety issues. In China where the safety barrier is a mere 20-25 metres, local residents get the full effect of a passing maglev vehicle much closer to their homes. In more rural areas, debris the vehicles pick up and rain down on the crop fields of local collective farms are especially hated by the farmers and mangers a like, they really don’t like that aspect of the Maglev lines.

The 200 km long planned extension to the Shanghai Maglev system was to have significant underground sections to limit noise, electromagnetic radiation pollution and exposure. Thus, greatly increasing the cost of the extension. When a nearby HSR line was built at much lower cost I might add, the Maglev extension was immediately sidelined.

My point is that even in China, where the environmental problems and the comfort level of local residents isn’t always the prime consideration of Maglev officials. Even they have had to admit that, high speed transport has to have safety and noise considerations that greatly complicate and add costs to their projects. Imagine the long and drawn out Environmental Assessment Process required in a western country like ours for a very high speed Maglev system. I have seen and read through the older Environmental Assessment proposals for VIA’s High Speed Rail lines here in Canada. These proposals have multiple volumes of hundreds of pages each. These are just the proposals not the full Environmental Assessments which would be longer and far more involved.

By: Johannes Urbanski

2018-01-06T01:14:30Z

Re Ultra, Transrapid and, to some extent, JR SCM

1 They do exist
The UIC (basically the IATA of the rail industry) lists 40,378 km of HSR networks as operational (as of November 2017) and another 14,615 km as under construction [1]. How many km of lines exist for SCM, Transrapid or “Ultra”?

2 There are real word examples
The UIC lists more than 300 HSR lines, of which more than half are already under operation [1]. What are the real world examples for SCM, Transrapid or “Ultra” – and even more: how many of them are already in intercity revenue service?

3 They donâ€™t use quasi-magical properties for their technology
None of the claimed properties is quasi-magical – it’s the multitude of these properties which are claimed simultaneously (and the refusal to acknowledge the existence of any of the trade-offs which have been characterising every single transportation project ever constructed by humanity): lower construction costs, lower operating costs, lower noise, shorter construction period, less visual intrusion, higher operating speeds, lower energy consumption, higher capacity, lower construction-related emissions, higher public acceptance, lower ticket prices. Doesn’t a transportation technology which has been tested and proven almost nowhere in the world (see 1 and 2), but comes with absolutely no trade-offs sound outlandish or quasi-magical to you?

4 The technology is superior to rail transport in a lot of respects
Agreed, but do they outweigh the economic, political and environmental disadvantages, such as being incompatible with the legacy rail system and therefore either forcing passengers to do additional transfers or to build punitively expensive downtown tunnels and countless underutilised branch lines?

5 There are well respected sources of information to confirm this but youâ€™re not interested in going into the technicals, are you?
You mean like the obscure Motor1.com article presented by Bjarne (seriously, this is the quality of sources for which only Hyperloop fanboys are known)? I’ve already acknowledged in countless discussions with you and the other Maglev fans (Bjarne, for instance) on the “High Speed Rail America Club” Facebook page that if you were building and planning an entire country for a population of 100 million in a dessert or on a different planet, Maglevs would be the mode of choice. When will you finally acknowledge that real-world transport planning is different to SimCity, as you have to respect the constraints imposed by decades and centuries of often inconsistent civil engineering construction for transportation infrastructure and other structures built under constantly changing priorities and land use policies?

And speaking of the suspended monorail in Wuppertal: you know what I answered my boss when he asked me “what do you Germans think about suspended monorails?”?
I answered: “We invented them over 100 years ago. We never built a second line.” Ironically, I could say almost the same about Maglevs: “We were one of the first when we started to develop Maglev trains 50 years ago and invested far more than a billion Dollars of our taxpayers’ money into the technology. In the end, the technology was always deemed to be too expensive and not adaptable enough to our existing transport networks and we therefore invested into HSR networks instead and eventually sold the technology to China where they did test this technology on one short suburban route before they decided to stick to HSR when expanding their intercity networks for basically the same reasons.”

[1] https://uic.org/IMG/pdf/20171101_high_speed_lines_in_the_world.pdf

By: Jarek

2018-01-05T10:08:42Z

(Of course, Wuppertalbahn is a local transit system, relatively low-speed and winding with lots of stops – not a high-speed intercity one being discussed in the post)

By: Malcolm

2018-01-04T15:30:49Z

PS Suspended monorail?
Check out –
https://www.wuppertal.de/microsite/en/tourism/schwebebahn/102370100000140310.php
which has been running since 1901

By: Malcolm

2018-01-04T15:28:48Z

Here is that paragraph in full:
“The beauty of proposing a gadgetbahn is that since it doesnâ€™t exist, proponents can make up all sorts of quasi-magical properties for their technology, which supposedly make it superior. Since there arenâ€™t real-world examples, proponents can use the most optimistic theoretical scenarios they can come up with, and compare them with the actual performance of projects that have been built and which are bound to the constraints of the real world.!”
Re Ultra, Transrapid and, to some extent, JR SCM
1 They do exist
2 There are real word examples
3 They don’t use quasi-magical properties for their technology
4 The technology is superior to rail transport in a lot of respects
5 There are well respected sources of information to confirm this but you’re not interested in going into the technicals, are you?
However, I do take your point that your main concern is the proposal to build a suspended monorail in Quebec and Montreal. Here, you have more knowledge than most reading your post.
It’s a shame you diluted this concern with an attack on new, developing and developed forms of transport which you lump together under the Gadgetbahn title, compounded with false information.
Yes, there are some proposals for transport which seem too good to be true, most of which don’t have a prototype up and running, perhaps this is what you mean by Gadgetbahn?

By: ant6n

2018-01-04T02:19:48Z

@Malcom
No, you’re missing the point. It doesn’t matter whether the Gadgetbahn enthusiasts got some small sample project running somewhere. The issue isn’t whether these technologies are impossible (and I made no such claim).

The question is whether the supposed near magical properties pan out (especially compared to existing/conventional technology), how long it took to develop the new technology, and whether the technology makes economical sense in the real world.

By: Malcolm

2018-01-02T20:03:51Z

You’re missing my point and, probably, Bjarne’s.
Ultra is operational.
Maglev is operational.
Apart from your claim they aren’t, you are spreading other false information in your opinions.
Is it too much to ask for accuracy?
Or does Gadgetbahn mean you can make claims where you don’t need to back up with facts, even though it does exist?

By: ant6n

2018-01-02T18:16:03Z

When you propose a Gadgetbahn, it doesn’t generally exist yet. That’s why you can make claims you don’t need to back up with facts.

By: Malcolm

2018-01-02T17:31:45Z

It’s interesting that two of the pictured “Gadgetbahns” you head your article with, Ultra and Maglev, are actually in commercial operation.
Perhaps, in view of your statement, “The beauty of proposing a gadgetbahn is that since it doesnâ€™t exist…”, you may feell the need to either change the images or rephrase your statement?