U.S. Maglev System One Step Closer


Ron Swaren is a regular commenter on Portland Transport.

Michael Barkoviak – June 9, 2008 5:50 AM

“President Bush signed a transportation bill that will help fund a high speed maglev train between Disneyland and Las Vegas. The initial $45M investment will be used for environmental studies to evaluate construction impact on one portion of the proposed maglev route.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., showed support of the project and said the maglev train “will safely and efficiently move people between southern California and Las Vegas.”

As more nations begin to roll out maglev train systems, critics in the U.S. grow increasingly frustrated over the lack of support of organized high speed trains in the United States.

With speeds up to 300 MPH, the maglev train will be able to transport passengers between the two locations, about 250 miles apart, in less than two hours. Most drivers who go from the Los Angeles or Anaheim area to Las Vegas are forced to take Interstate 15, but the highway routinely is clogged with gridlock during rush hour.

Congress must now choose the maglev system over other train projects under consideration by the government, including a diesel-electric train that was proposed after a 2005 funding mishap that delayed the Disneyland-Las Vegas line. Japan was the first nation to launch a diesel-hybrid train system, but the train was twice as expensive to build as a regular train.

The United States Maglev Coalition (USMC) is an organization wanting to develop maglev technology in the U.S. The group helped the federal government fix a September 2005 report that “unfairly and erroneously criticized maglev’s costs while ignoring its benefits.”

Maglev trains are extremely expensive to create, so $45M could easily lead to a multi-billion dollar investment. The Shanghai maglev train network cost almost $30M per mile to create, and a proposed route in Japan is estimated to cost up to $82B to complete.

Germany, Canada, England, China and Japan are included in the small selection of countries that either have working maglev systems or are testing maglev technology.”

Link to Daily Tech article:
http://www.dailytech.com/US+Maglev+System+One+Step+Closer/article12020.htm

Some YouTube videos:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaa6x8Oz8Y&feature=related

Some people say that the US should just hang back and learn from the experimentation being conducted by other governments, as mentioned above. Critics of the LA-Las Vegas route question the propriety of investing public funds into what they consider an “entertainment express.” There are, however, some proposals in the Northeast US for Mag Lev service.
Some cost projections run up to $30 million per mile for the specialized track. Acquiring right of way could add significant expense. What flaws will actual usage of the technology reveal?

Or would an alternative like the proposed California high speed train make more sense?
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/


0 responses to “U.S. Maglev System One Step Closer”

  1. Disneyland? DISNEYLAND????

    I can see Las Vegas Airport (monorail connection to major casinos) to LA Union Station (hub of Amtrak, commuter rail and LA’s subway and growing LRT network). But Disneyland? It’s barely served by transit. How are the projected maglev riders supposed to get there?

  2. I’ve only been in the main LA Amtrak station once, but Anaheim is, I guess, a proximate extension. Maybe Disney Studios figures they could sell tickets as an alternative ride??

  3. I don’t know, I think Disneyland to Las Vegas is a good route for this sort of project. Keep in mind this route was abandoned by Amtrak not that long ago because of lack of ridership*, so even though I-15 is full, these aren’t passengers that would willingly sit on a train unless the train is, well, a cross between a Las Vegas Casino and Disneyland, which it will be if those are the destinations… (Hopefully they can maintain a Maglev system better than they do the monorail.)

    *Okay, that isn’t entirely true. There wasn’t enough capacity on the tracks, (back when they abandoned it, I imagine it is worse now,) to maintain a semi-reliable schedule. And who wants to go to Vegas for the weekend if your train is going to be 12 hours late? But that is true for many of Amtrak’s lines, and most of them still have passengers, so…

  4. Actually most of the revenue and passengers generated by the old Desert Wind was from the east not from the Los Angeles area.

  5. Of course, maybe the purpose of the maglev is to let Las Vegas tourists take a day-long excursion to Disneyland, rather than letting Angelinos travel to and from Las Vegas. If that’s the case, I can’t see putting public funding behind it.

    Of course, maybe they could do both. Union Station to Disneyland is almost a straight shot via the Santa Ana Freeway, so there’s an almost-straight public right-of-way already in place. Maglev from Union Station to Disneyland probably would get a LOT of riders, and it could then continue on to Las Vegas via whatever route they found for it. Maybe put a couple more stops in the LA area on the way out. I’m guessing that if the maglev mostly needs to use existing freeways and rail lines for right-of-way, it won’t be able to get up to full speed until it’s outside the greater LA area anyway, so a stop or two won’t hurt too much.

  6. Does anyone think that the dissolution of the German Transrapid partnership (between Siemans and ThyssenKrupp) will have any effect on plans to build Maglev in the US? See this article: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3325455,00.html. The Transrapid train technology was used in Shanghai and is listed as the basis for most (all?) of the possible US Maglev projects.

  7. It’s instructive that with peak oil looming, we’re choosing to develop a maglev train between Disneyland and Las Vegas while Amtrak’s future is perpetually threatened.

    God Bless America™.

  8. Douglas K. wrote: But Disneyland? It’s barely served by transit.

    Interestingly, I would disagree.

    Most tourists stay at a nearby hotel, and often use the hotel shuttles or the Anaheim Resort Transit (ART) shuttles to get between the hotels, Convention Center, and Disneyland. Disneyland actually has a substantial “transit center” located just east of the main plaza between Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure.

    While it’s not an OCTA/Metro hub (although several OCTA busses do serve Disneyland, and the LACMTA (Metro) does have several routes from Los Angeles to Disneyland), I would say that transit usage is pretty high to access Disneyland. There has been talk of expanding the Monorail to become a true transit system rather than an amusement park ride (similar to Walt Disney World, where the monorail is not a ride but a part of the park’s transportation system which includes busses, water taxis, and highways).

    When I travel to Disneyland it is often the one place where I never need to think about a rental car. I can easily get around carfree and I have taken trips from Anaheim to downtown L.A. using Metrolink (commuter rail), Metro Red Line (heavy rail subway) and Metro and DASH busses quite easily. And I haved used OCTA busses as well.

    Gordon wrote: we’re choosing to develop a maglev train between Disneyland and Las Vegas while Amtrak’s future is perpetually threatened

    That’s because maglev and Amtrak serve two very, very different purposes. For example, if a maglev line were built between Portland and Seattle, maglev wouldn’t stop at Vancouver, Kelso/Longview, Centralia/Chehalis, Olympia/Lacey, Tacoma, or Tukwila – all stops that Amtrak makes.

    Same with Portland-south. Maglev might stop in Eugene, but not Salem or Albany; nor would a maglev route follow the current Amtrak route (across the Cascades to Chemult and Klamath Falls). It might stop in Medford, and the next stop would be Sacramento – skipping Dunsmuir, Redding and Chico.

  9. $30m per mile for Maglev?

    That sounds cheap compared to say, $75m for the Seattle Monorail or $69m for the MAX Green Line. How are things so cheap in Japan?

  10. This project doesn’t just connect Disneyland to Vegas, it connects Anaheim’s entertainment district, complete with their Amtrak/Metrolink station, Angels Stadium, the Honda Center, mixed use apartment/condo/retail developments, a short shuttle van/bus ride to the massive convention center and hotels nearby, and a future connection to California High Speed Rail at Ontario Int’l Airport.

    Anaheim will not be served by that project, so it’s filling a big gap in the system. Disneyland and its neighbors are one of the top tourism destinations in the US.

    I do love the idea of OR working with CA to link the NW high speed and California’s HSR corridor. Then, I think of the tunneling that would be required. It’ll be way too expensive for decades probably, unless the NW adds a lot more population.

    Maybe if a connecting line to the Tri Cities and Spokane along SR-14 and existing rail lines, and we wait until ridership grows enough, the cost could be cheap enough per passenger to be a reasonable idea.

    There are really just too many mountains through much of the NW to really get 220+ mph rail. We won’t connect to California in the next 30 years, and that’s probably being very optimistic. Unless the federal government decides to add HSR to the Interstate network.

    It could be done, but at current rates that would be about $2.8 trillion dollars, if my math is right. At the airlines 1999 record profits ($5.4 bil) it would take over 500 years to pay it off. Not counting interest. It would be cool to get to NY in under 14 hours by train from Portland though…

  11. “MRB Says:

    $30m per mile for Maglev?

    That sounds cheap compared to say, $75m for the Seattle Monorail or $69m for the MAX Green Line. How are things so cheap in Japan?”

    Not really a fair comparison. Max and the Seattle monorail are urban projects with a need for multiple stations and lots of small trains to keep headways at reasonable levels. The closest local comparison I can come up with is Washington County Commuter Rail which I believe comes out to about $9 million per mile, though that is definitely not a fair comparison to any of the projects mentioned (including MagLev).

  12. The MagLev has to run on an elevated track—nuch like a monorail–with much of the electrical apparatus contaned within the track. Why does it have to elevated? I would wonder if mass production of the track components could bring the cost down. Does anyone know if the HSR requires an expensive, deluxe track? Standard rail track isn’t all that expensive.

    Just food for thought: Since MagLev’s rely on electrical power could they be solar powered in the Southwest—and wind and wavepowered on the Pacific Coast?

  13. Ron Swaren wrote: Since MagLev’s rely on electrical power could they be solar powered in the Southwest—and wind and wavepowered on the Pacific Coast?

    What happens when the sun goes down, do the trains stop running?

    Solar, wind, etc., are going to be a power source, but you still need a reliable, constant source of power. Hydro is pretty good (except for the problems of fish habitat) but otherwise you have three choices – coal, natural gas, or nuclear.

  14. What happens when the sun goes down, do the trains stop running?

    Why do so many people assume that solar power is ‘real time’?

  15. Why do so many people assume that solar power is ‘real time’?

    Why do so many people forget that battery power isn’t useful for stuff that is measured in hundreds of kilowatt-hours of use?

    Maglevs aren’t your average motor on your hybrid car – they are massive electromagnets that are levitating hundreds of tons of steel and passengers. This requires base load generation to accomplish.

  16. “Why do so many people assume that solar power is ‘real time’?”

    “Why do so many people forget that battery power isn’t useful for stuff that is measured in hundreds of kilowatt-hours of use?”

    Batteries scale about as well as solar PV. In other words, hundreds of kilowatts of batteries is just as possible as hundreds of kilowatts of solar panels, it just costs a lot of money.

    However, On utility scale, there is better [cheaper] solar technology than PV. Concentrating solar power is one of them: you use mirrors to heat an “object” and make steam to turn a turbine. The object can be the water itself, meaning that the electricity is only produced when the sun is shining, or it can not be, there are several plants that heat molten salt (which has a very high thermal density,) and then use a heat exchanger to pull heat off the molten salt to make electricity whenever they want, (middle of the day, middle of the night, whatever.)

    That said, at the moment [in most places in this country, including Portland] the power demand peaks on summer afternoon on hot sunny days because everyone has their AC on. And so a bunch of fossil fuel (in Portland, some of them are burning diesel) based generators turn on and generate the power to power that. That is also the same time that solar PV puts out a lot of power. So trying to store the solar PV power for later use is dumb, that power should be put into the electrical grid at the peak, which happens to be right when the sun is shinning. And, unfortunately, it will be a long time before we install enough solar panels to make a dent in that peak big enough that we should even consider storing that energy for later use.

  17. Who said anything about batteries? Besides the hurdle of getting any batteries with enough power to run something like that, the wiring to or from the batteries would have to be of some alloy that would both conduct efficiently and stand vey high temperatures. I just meant that those southerly routes could operate off of grid power which also has solar generated input; likewise with a coastal system.

    Somebody say nuclear? What about a nuclear powered train? Call it the Nimitz…..

  18. Who said anything about batteries? Besides the hurdle of getting any batteries with enough power to run something like that

    It sounds like a good idea to me, then if there’s a power outage around the tracks the train can keep going for a bit.

    Not the intent of the original poster, but not a bad idea either…

  19. Matthew wrote: That said, at the moment [in most places in this country, including Portland] the power demand peaks on summer afternoon on hot sunny days because everyone has their AC on.

    Actually that’s incorrect (in Portland) – the peak demand in Oregon is in the winter.

    http://www.portlandgeneral.com/about_pge/corporate_info/about_us.asp?bhcp=1

    Historical peak load (Dec. 21, 1998) 4,073,000 kilowatts

    In fact, the reason that Pacific Power bought Utah Power in the late 1980s is because Pacific Power’s peak demand is in the winter, but Utah Power’s peak demand is in the summer (because the vast majority of homes in Utah use gas heat, but are more heavily dependent upon air conditioning than Oregon is). So PacifiCorp can more efficiently balance its load and its generation; whereas PGE has an energy deficit in the winter and a surplus in the summer.

    Now, you are right in that more homes in Oregon are choosing A/C, and so the summer load is higher than historically. But in Oregon, the peak is still in the winter.

    And so a bunch of fossil fuel (in Portland, some of them are burning diesel) based generators turn on and generate the power to power that.

    Where are these diesel generators? Working in the electric utility business, I’m not aware of any… I do know of a peak natural gas generator, but not diesel (or bunker oil, for that matter).

    That is also the same time that solar PV puts out a lot of power.

    The problem is, Oregon doesn’t get the good direct sunlight in the winter to make wide spread solar feasible. Yes, it does work for limited, low wattage applications. Portland could start by converting all traffic lights to solar (especially given the new long-life, low wattage LED signal heads that are popular.) Maybe street lighting. But it wouldn’t make a significant dent in Portland’s load needs.

    Every day, I agree more and more with those who think nuclear is the way to go. Yes, there’s that pesky issue of waste storage. But it’s either that, or a non-constant generation (solar, wind), burning coal or natural gas (or worse, bunker or diesel), or killing fish with hydro.

    From a “worst case scenario” standpoint, I read a report that showed that more people were killed by hydro than nuclear. I was shocked when I read it, and granted the deaths were mainly from a couple of major dam collapses in the Far East. But imagine if Bonneville’s spillway failed – where would the water go? Parts of Portland and Vancouver would flood. (Especially if The Dalles Dam failed, causing a domino effect.) Yes, one in a ka-trillion chance…but not impossible.

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