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.
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.