Attualmente mi trovo a Shanghai e ho appena fatto un giro sullo Shanghai Maglev, basato sulla tecnologia originariamente sviluppata in Germania negli anni ’80. Il Transrapid fu ampiamente testato sulla pista di prova di Emsland e a quel punto la Germania era davvero decenni avanti rispetto al resto del mondo.
Ciò che rende il Transrapid così avvincente oltre la velocità è il principio di base: la levitazione magnetica significa zero contatto meccanico, zero usura e quasi nessuna manutenzione rispetto alla rotaia convenzionale. Guidarla è davvero un’esperienza surreale, completamente silenziosa, nessuna vibrazione, solo accelerazione. Difficile da descrivere se non l’hai sentito.
Ciò che mi frustra è che il Transrapid è stato sostanzialmente distrutto in Germania a causa di problemi di finanziamento e di forti pressioni da parte della Deutsche Bahn. Nel frattempo la Cina ha concesso in licenza la tecnologia, che qui funziona in modo affidabile dal 2004.
Stare qui a guardare questo treno che sfreccia a 430 km/h grazie a una tecnologia radicata nell’ingegneria tedesca è una sensazione agrodolce. Pensi che l’Europa riprenderà mai seriamente la questione? Curioso cosa ne pensate tutti.
https://i.redd.it/vu3htwafzsng1.jpeg
di rundemoral
27 commenti
Nope.
It is way too expensive and due to how cities are located and the distance between them a Maglev wouldn’t be able to properly bring forth all its benefits.
I’d love to have this and be in the middle of Berlin or Munich in under 2 hours but it is economically not feasible.
Didn’t this cost something like 500M €/km? A short Munich – Augsburg route would be a 35B € project. And how long to recoup that cost?
WENN SIE! Vom Hauptbahnhof in München…
I would be curious to know if some rail expert answers. My assumption is that before adding fast trains, we should invest to level up the overall infrastructure.
>What frustrates me is that the Transrapid was essentially killed off in Germany due to funding issues and heavy lobbying by Deutsche Bahn.
No, it was killed because it is a system which isn’t suitable for the German network structure.
Even if Europe tries to make a comeback, it’s unlikely that they would match China’s Maglev since China has built on that technology for decades already, unless they hired Chinese contractors, which would then mean it’s technically China technology. It’s the same story for a lot of critical technologies. West had a headstart, China innovates and gets much further ahead. Classic example: EV.
I asked this in a group of Germans and one guy was almost yelling, stating how this is such a nonsense idea and how no one in Germany needs this! And, BTW, they had tried that once and there was an accident, and now it’s pointless to try again. It all felt like someone was talking about their anxiety disorder at a therapist’s, so I thought: maybe this is one of the many collective neuroses every nation has, where people seem to be set in their ways about a certain topic, just because it’s not part of how things were always done.
And I was right: It’s a decade later, trains are running even worse and the new head of Deutsche Bahn confidently goes out into the public and proclaims: Things are going to suck for a long while now, even if we keep investing into this.
Also, the same guy from the story is one of those Germans who are all like: “Why is Germany so car brained?” Well, some people just don’t have the luxury to wait around for decades for DB to get their act together. They just need to be at work on time or whatever.
Around the time of the Shanghai deal someone summed it up as: “A wonderful invention but unfortunately 150 years late.” The advantages over conventional high speed rail are just too marginal to make up for all the disadvantages.
Honestly, I don’t understand this fascination with supposedly groundbreaking future technology.
We don’t need a super train or anything like that in Germany. We need a well funded, modernized train network, and that’s all there is to it.
That would solve 80% of all our public transport problems.
And yet china has not built a single kilometer of additional track after the initial route.
>Meanwhile China licensed the technology and it has been running reliably here since 2004.
China is loosing a lot of money because of the Maglev.
That’s why we are luckily not using it.
Not after the Transrapid shot the Schadbär.
no
Not really, the capital costs and maintenance costs are too high and the speed advantage alone isn’t really that good given that it breaks compatibility with legacy mainline railways. Also since 2021 the shanghai maglev was speed limited to 300km/h due to wear and electricity costs. Europe probably won’t get into this tech for a long while since we don’t have the dense corridors that can justify the high costs for now but if the Japanese maglev succeeds and matures as a technology, maybe. We’re probably better off fixing our current capacity issues and funding the expansion and overhaul plans that should’ve been built ages ago to get the system up to standard and then shift to implementing stuff like the Deutschlandtakt before thinking of other technologies when we’re not even using what we have to its full potential.
It currently does in Berlin. Not as a real project, but as our version of Musks Hyperloop, as an argument to undermine real public transport projects.
No it’s way to expensive and not really worth it
It would be much better if we just expanded the high speed rail ways
>What frustrates me is that the Transrapid was essentially killed off in Germany due to funding issues and heavy lobbying by Deutsche Bahn.
That wasn’t the problem. Sure, the whole Transrapid projekt was heckled with regulatory barriers after the Emsland incident, but the truth was that there was no market for the Transrapid.
The Transrapid is positioned between the classic railway and domestic flights. Since domestic flights got cheaper and cheaper, there wasnt really a market for a cost expensive alternative to the classic railway. Plus you had to build an infrastructure solely for the Transrapid with large and high concrete railways. Which couldn’t be included in existing large cities like all the Cities in the Ruhrgebiet, Hamburg, or Berlin, which would lead to additional delays if you want to switch to an ICE in Dortmund Hbf oder Berlin Hbf.
>Meanwhile China licensed the technology and it has been running reliably here since 2004.
ALso not the whole truth. The origin transrapid in China which you are refering to is running on a very short (8 minutes travel time) route and also only as a prestige project that generates a negative profit every year. There are also newer projects, but they are still a long way from being market-ready and certainly not financially profitable.
For Germany it is just not necessary. We could just build conventional high speed rail lines between our cities and achieve way better journey times than we currently have.
Take Berlin – Stuttgart which is about 500km by air and currently takes at best case 4:50 hours on one daily train only.
If you look over at France, Paris – Strasbourg is about 400km by air and currently takes 1:45 hours.
With proper investment and political will, faster travel times would be achievable in Germany.
For example, upgrading Berlin – Halle to speeds greater than 200km/h, upgrading Erlangen – Nuremburg to greater than 160km/h and building a new line from Nuremberg to Stuttgart could achieve travel speed similar to that in France.
Hopefully not. We need to increase capacity and resilience by expanding our conventional rail network, not some fancy, expensive, non-interoperable gadget
Ask in /r/Munich
Sadly, no
Unlikely. The problem is not so much an engineering problem, but a practical problem.
The a big problem is that magnetic levitation does not so far has a standartized train to track interface (Unlike classical railways where standard gauche iron rails are the estabished standard interface). Hence any Maglev instalation is inherently insular. It is also overally quite very expensive to build and maintain.
Even in China, while the technology is used in the Shanghai Maglev, the bulk of the high speed infrastructure has been build up using the conventional iron rail design and not using maglev technology, which was already available to that country when the bulk of it was being build. Similarly even projects like the Californian high-speed rail are executed using iron rails and not as a maglev, despite being in a much more favorable position for choosing maglev technology that any German railway.
The same issues are likely also the reason why vacuum tube maglev trains (often refered to as hyperloop) are unlikely to make a big appearance on the world state.
Doubtful, as much as I love the technology and would love to see it in action.
The need for a completely separate and incompatible infrastructure is a major blow to the technology and makes it extremely expensive to deploy.
When Transrapid was developed in the 80s, its speed and comfort gave it a huge edge over conventional rail that might have justified the expense. But conventional rail has caught up so much over the last decades that maglev’s advantages are now merely marginal.
Conventional high-speed rail now runs routinely at up to some 350 km/h and the modern suspension and noise isolation systems make for a ride that is just as smooth and comfortable, at a fraction of the cost.
No.
Because there was one accident in the 90s due to human error we will never try it again.
Plains, trains, cars don’t ever have accidents.
i don’t care about the tech but I agree that we should have a europe wide train network that is fast enough so people stop flying.
“almost no maintenance compared to conventional rail”
This couldn’t be more wrong. Yes, there are no rail that tear. But you have a magnetic system which needs times more maintenance than overhead wires. Also the Transrapid track is a concrete standing free bridge from meter 0 to the end exposed to all weather conditions from several sides which requires regular maintenance and needs full replacement after some 40-60 years which is way more expensive than just replacing the gravel and put new rails.
Transrapid is simply so much more expensive than conventional rail. Just compare the ticket prices in Shanghai between the metro and the Transrapid….
No, magnetic trains are gimmicky prestige projects and are just vastly inferior to regular trains.