FeòragRe: last boost. The German transport minister would like to see maglevs back.
Also, this word meaning (I think) “Public Transport Financing Act” - Gemeindeverkehrsfinanzierungsgesetzes
Till Westermayer@feorag More or less, Gemeinde means communal (city/town/county) in this case.
Charlie Stross@_tillwe_ @feorag Thus ignoring the only sensible reason for going with maglev—sheer speed over long distance routes, competing with jet airliners—and ignoring that local transport needs to be cheap or free to get people out of their cars.
(Also, they don't seem to remember what happened to Transrapid. Oops.)
@cstross @feorag My guess: Friedrich Merz' frame of reference is 1998-2002, the year Merkel replaced him as chairperson of the CDU parliamentary party. Everything after this time is an error, to be ignored or corrected. (Or as one person in another thread on this asked: can I have back Grunge, too?).
@_tillwe_ @feorag There *might* be something I don't know—the new Chinese rare earth magnets this century have revolutionized car drivetrains, so they might no longer need superconductors for schwebebahn (i.e. light rail) applications?—but I doubt it's anything as forward-thinking as that, coming from the CDU.
JollyOrc@cstross @[email protected] @feorag the same clown posse also wants nuclear power back, along with "high efficiency combustion engines" and "green gas" power plants.
All their ideas are from the 80ies at best.
David Scott Moyer@jollyorc @cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag In my ever so humble opinion, the problem with nuclear power is that we implemented it long before we figured out how to do it safely, cleanly, and with proper disposal/re-use of the waste. Then, because it was online and monetized, we never bothered to figure out those things.
mathew
Tubemeister@farbel @mathew @jollyorc @cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag I think your assessments are halves of the same argument.
It takes a long time and a godforsaken amount of money to build nuke power _because_ we haven't figured out how to run this stuff safer and more efficiently, we've been dragging our feet for decades and now it's too late and we're up against the wall.
@farbel @mathew @jollyorc @cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag I still think nuclear power could've had a good place in the mix, for steady high power industry like data centers(*) that you're not going to run off some simple rooftop solar.
* not the AI kind, the legitimate kind that replaces a couple thousand companies with on-prem servers.
But the time to start building would've been a decade ago at least. By now that money is better spent elsewhere, like upgrading the grid.
@farbel @Tubemeister @mathew @jollyorc @_tillwe_ @feorag Naah, fusion turns out to be *difficult*—high temperature plasmas trapped in magnetic fields are unstable and like to dump their charge into the structure if they possibly can. Actual stable ones require lots of computing power that only became available after the 1980s, and meanwhile large plasma experiments like ITER have costs that scale as roughly the fourth power of their output, so they're monstrously expensive.
Stephen Cox Author@Tubemeister @stephenwhq @farbel @mathew @jollyorc @_tillwe_ @feorag We've GOT stable commercial fusion power! You can buy it right now, by the kilowatt of solar panels!
@farbel @jollyorc @_tillwe_ @feorag Also, 99% of the "high level waste" is basically unburned fuel with 98% of the energy still in there, which is uneconomical to reprocess and use as fuel at current market prices, but which *would work fine as fuel* if we priced in reprocessing and slapped a moratorium on uranium mining for a few centuries.
This is a failure caused by slaving adherence to market ideology, not a waste disposal problem.
Zillion@farbel @zillion @jollyorc @_tillwe_ @feorag I think he(?) is referring to Uranium fission reactors that require enrichment (and can be tuned to breed plutonium) as opposed to low enrichment reactors or Thorium reactors which are erroneously believed not to be proliferation risks (they can be tweaked to produce 233U, which is usable in a bomb).
jsl@jollyorc @cstross @[email protected]@[email protected] I understand that people get Oh-New-Shiny fascination around new tech, but once you build it, it's often a lot less sparkly and exciting and needs to integrate into existing infrastructure. Thus, you end up with a single maglev train in Shanghai that could do 450 kph, but only does 300 in normal service and is surprisingly wobbly at speed. Hydrogen trains with reliability issues and hydrogen cars without infrastructure for a road trip.
The boring bit would be to invest into the build-out of cost-effective things, like solar and wind power; trams and commuter rail services. Not sexy-shiny but actually usable.
The boring bit would be to invest into the build-out of cost-effective things, like solar and wind power; trams and commuter rail services. Not sexy-shiny but actually usable.
@jsl @jollyorc … And now China is building out 450 kph steel wheel on rail trains and one wonders what the value proposition of maglev is, anyway. (As for hydrogen, it's the fuel of the future, and always will be, except for high Isp rocketry—upper stages for interplanetary missions, basically. Just look at how hard NASA find it to handle then ask why anyone imagines it's practical for trains, planes, and automobiles ...)
@cstross @jollyorc That's why the Japanese attempt at a 500 kph maglev is interesting: running cost.
Germany's Deutsche Bahn spec'd their ICE 2s for 330 kph, but exponentially higher running cost means that they limit service speeds to 280-300 kph.
China will be able to do 450 kph on rails, but track and trains are going to be very hard to maintain
If maglev turns out to be cheaper to run at speed, it will be viable.
None of this is remotely interesting to people who announce plans for maglevs to airports, hydrogen cars, miniature nuclear reactors or computing in space. They like the soft sf-y sound of it, not the hard sf implementation.
Germany's Deutsche Bahn spec'd their ICE 2s for 330 kph, but exponentially higher running cost means that they limit service speeds to 280-300 kph.
China will be able to do 450 kph on rails, but track and trains are going to be very hard to maintain
If maglev turns out to be cheaper to run at speed, it will be viable.
None of this is remotely interesting to people who announce plans for maglevs to airports, hydrogen cars, miniature nuclear reactors or computing in space. They like the soft sf-y sound of it, not the hard sf implementation.
Eric S. Smith
Oneirogen
MidgePhoto
Landa 
@jollyorc as far as I remember, even bad German SF from the 80ies (including weak tea like Zärtliche Chaoten II*) assumed that electric cars were the unquestioned ground transport by the 2040ies (in the absence of world war 3).
So I‘m not sure where he gets his fantasies but they‘re not 80ies fantasies.
*) dear English readers who tried to translate the title: yes it sounds like a french erotic film, no it doesn’t make any sense in context either. Sorry.
datenwolfThe Transrapid doesn't use superconducting magnets.
Trouble with the TR is, that it spreads the costs in the trackway, instead of concentrating them in the vehicles.
Maritime shipping is cheap because the oceans are for free. Railroad tracks are incredibly cheap, compared to roads, that's why even in car dependent USA an absolutely enormous amount of goods is transported by train.
@datenwolf @_tillwe_ @feorag Also the Transrapid crash demonstrated an alarming failure mode of high speed maglev, i.e. at airliner speeds you have to observe airline industry safety standards or you get airliner disaster levels of fatalities:
Ysegrim@cstross @[email protected] @feorag Transrapid never needed one or the other. The system was designed with super strict tolerances and electronic control so that the air gap between stator (track) and "rotor" was 10mm, meaning classical Cu based electric magnets sufficed.
Might be that Neodym magnets even improve efficiency here though.
Rob Abram@ysegrim @cstross @feorag We had a public-transport Maglev in Berlin at the end of the 80s - the M-Bahn. It was shit, and one of its party tricks was overrunning the buffers at Kemperplatz station with hilarious results.
@robabram @ysegrim @cstross Japan has one, in Nagoya. It was built for an Expo, but was made part of the public transport system later. The only other slow speed maglev I can think of is the one that used to be at Birmingham airport. That was fine except it was one of a kind and was killed by a lack of spare parts.
LabSpokane
NSKE@LabSpokane @feorag @robabram @ysegrim @cstross I think we need to declare a moratorium on that Simpsons episode.
@nske @LabSpokane @feorag @robabram @ysegrim What is "Simpsons"? Is it a new kind of epilepsy by any chance? Or something to do with the "telly-vision" people keep trying to tell me about?
oheso
RootWyrm 🇺🇦
@robabram @ysegrim @cstross @feorag also, do you mean the 'magical' Chinese 'super trains' that they won't let anyone actually look at but basically look like a 5th grader copied Elon Musk's homework?
Where they somehow licensed that exact technology (Transrapid) and magically got it to 620km/h?
(China fucking lies. Constantly. And very obviously if you bother to learn anything about the claims.)
Where they somehow licensed that exact technology (Transrapid) and magically got it to 620km/h?
(China fucking lies. Constantly. And very obviously if you bother to learn anything about the claims.)
The Penguin of Evil
Weekend Editor
JTI@jti42 @ysegrim @cstross @feorag The Berliner Verkehrsseiten website has the full history of the M-Bahn at http://berliner-verkehrsseiten.de/m-bahn/Geschichte/geschichte.html
WellsiteGeo@robabram @ysegrim @cstross @feorag
Nobody tag @[email protected] on this. We don't want him avoiding these problems when (if) he ever (eventually) builds a "Hyperloop".
Szymon Sokół 🇵🇱🇪🇺🇺🇦@cstross @[email protected] @feorag I saw this just this morning: https://phys.org/news/2026-03-palm-sized-superconducting-magnet-tesla.html
Palm-sized superconducting magnet achieves 42 tesla, rivaling the world's biggest
When we think of powerful magnets used in particle accelerators or for NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance), we often envision bulky machines, sometimes the size of buildings. But in an extraordinary breakthrough for physics, scientists at ETH Zurich have created magnets that are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand yet powerful enough to rival some of the world's most powerful magnets.
Brian Gordon@blotosmetek @cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag
How long until someone suggests it could form the core of a "warp drive".
Probably already happening out beyond the fringes of sanity.
Could make for improved power:weight ratios, I'll grant.
Blue Cat@cstross the company that built the driveway for the transrapid is trying to sell a maglev light rail: https://transportsystemboegl.com/fahrzeug/
Helge Wilker
Aslak Raanes
Traumkämpfer@cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag speed has also stopped mattering as much as it's now almost entirely dominated by go to start of fast thing, check in, wait, and then get from end of fast thing to where you wanted to actually go. The faster you go the less effect it has on trip time
Secondly the work on the way or do stuff on the way mindset has grown with WiFi etc. Why rush from London to Glasgow if your boss is paying you to "work" on the train ?
Secondly the work on the way or do stuff on the way mindset has grown with WiFi etc. Why rush from London to Glasgow if your boss is paying you to "work" on the train ?
Nicovel0 🍉@etchedpixels @cstross @_tillwe_ @feorag or sleep on the train, I really hope we’re going to see a resurgence of sleeper trains.
@Nicovel0 @etchedpixels @cstross @_tillwe_ It seems to be happening, very slowly (looks with interest at the new service between Paris and Berlin).
@feorag @etchedpixels @cstross @_tillwe_ I really hope it happens, I’d rather catch a train in the evening and wake up at my destination than wake up early to then catch a fast train or (shudder) go to the airport.