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Berlin’s plan for driverless magnetic trains derided by climate groups
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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Nobody needs driverless or magnetic. Just do the simple fucking trains for now. Bunch of circus baboons the lot...
Driverless transport is a huge boon to a transit system.
If they didn't advertise it and kept it lowkey nobody would have complained..
Driverless is fine, but what's the maglev for? It's a tech that sounds futuristic, but solves no problem and causes a bunch of new ones.
Speed. High speed trains clock in at 300 km/h, whereas maglev takes you to 600 km/h.
I agree with the above commenter, the EU needs to streamline passenger rights and international connections first, like they did for airtravel, but once that is taken care of, the next step is connecting European capitals on high speed maglev with very few stops.
To give you a sense of what such a transportation system could achieve, you could go from Lisbon to Kiev in 6 hours and a half at 600 km/h. If capitals served as country maglev hubs, we could do away with intra European flights altogether and cut a significant amount of flights to outside of Europe by concentrating the departures.
You could then have a hierarchy of sorts where maglev serves traveling between capitals, high speed between major cities within countries, regional between regions of smaller sparsely populated towns and local trains within cities or between close cities. Ideally if a passenger wanted to travel from a small town into another small town 3000 km away, the service should book all the appropriate hierarchy changes in one ticket.
The issue is that the line would have to be pretty much straight or have very shallow curves, due to the speed, so it would take a TON of land buying. That's complicated enough as it is without even considering the NIMBYs.
The line that is proposed in Berlin is less then 10km long. If speed is the great upside of maglev then it can't even play out this strength here.
Oh yeah no issues from me there. I was answering the original question of what maglev tech is for. Maglev only makes sense for very long distances.
This is intracity travel. There isn't enough distance for high speed lines to make sense.
You could even split it into different tiers, depending on demand and system load. If tons of people are going between, let’s say, Zurich and Madrid, they could just run a dedicated service straight through. On the flip side, a “limited express” that makes stops at national border stations and capitals would decrease the necessity of backtracking as much (e.g. Berlin to Poznań).
I'd imagine maybe larger countries would have more than one stop, but the issue is every time the maglev makes a stop it needs to slow down and speed up again and that adds up over time. I think that's a big issue with high speed trains nowadays in certain regions. The train is at maximum allowed speed by infrastructure about 40% of the time because it stops too often.
It would be a shame if it became impractical due to being too slow so people would take the plane instead. If you look at the Japanese Shinkansen stops are very well spaced, for instance, Tokio-Nagoya or Osaka-Hiroshima with no stops in betwen. That's 350 ish km with no stops.
That’s why I was discussing having different service levels that stop at different frequencies - direct (high-load city-to-city with no stops), express (between capital/core cities), and limited express (capital/core + border stations, perhaps just serviced with existing high-speed non-maglev lines)
which would be great but the end point is only 6km away - you'll spend the entire trip accelerating and then decelerating.
No, it will run at up to 150 km/h. Not inter-, but intra-city.
This article mentions it would be easier and cheaper to build new maglev tracks compared to traditional rails, because it needs no catenary, and can be put on stilts.
Fucking magnets , how do they work ?
Seriously though what is maglev ?
Driverless is pretty good as far as trains are concerned. It's already figured out in some systems, so it's not unproven technology as is the case in cars.
Driverless is fine, it's the magnetic thing that has me raising an eyebrow.
There's plenty of systems that would fall apart without driverless as their train frequencies are so high manual operation is not an option. Under less extreme circumstances it's still a good idea because it allows you to use more small trains instead of fewer larger trains, saving space (smaller stations), operating costs (drivers tend to want to be paid), and increasing frequency which is mindbogglingly important in public transit.
As to magnetic: This system in particular is very good, better than standard rail, at elevated track because it can be built lighter because the train doesn't produce point-loads (in the form of wheel contact), but forces that are easier to direct into the ground. It's also quieter.
This is not a high-speed system, 150km/h is the current max and IIRC they said the tech can't possibly ever do more than 200km/h. We're not talking about building a Shinkansen or Transrapid, but something metro-scaled, both in capability and cost.
Copenhagen has driverless in their subway system. Works great.