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.
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@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?