300mph Maglev trains: Newcastle to Scotland

[Cobbles]

It's not so much about people commuting to london, more about them living and working in newcastle / leeds / scotland, but having the ability to get to london quicky and cheaply when they need to.

But they can do that already and have been able to do so since the likes of British Midland started to erode BA's internal flight monopoly in the UK back in the 1980's.

Even Inverness is now only an hour and a half away from Bristol for the princely sum of 50 quid on average thanks to Easyjet.

Don't forget, a maglev train is only doing 300MPH between stops......

 

[Crispy]

Maglev has an advantage with many stops, as it's mre than twice as quick to accelerate and decelerate. It's still an impractical option though, as new track needs to be built every time.

Inverness is a bit of an extreme example, don't you think? London-Glasgow/Edinburgh/Newcastle is a more sensible target, and always remember to factor in transfer times.

 

[davgraham]

I would love it if we got some of these

http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-...-hope-on-high-speed-rail-link-61634-20131633/

There's an interesting discussion of a HSR link and supposed environmental benefits on this

http://www.transformscotland.org.uk/info/docs/2006-10-16_HSR.pdf


its a pdf file and reviews lots of research by transport specialists.

Gra

 

[Oswaldtwistle]

How does Maglev compare in terms of energy consumption?

 

[Cobbles]

Maglev has an advantage with many stops, as it's mre than twice as quick to accelerate and decelerate. It's still an impractical option though, as new track needs to be built every time.

5 stops at 10 minutes/stop adds an hour to a journey vs. a point to point service.

Inverness is a bit of an extreme example, don't you think? London-Glasgow/Edinburgh/Newcastle is a more sensible target,

I have friends who live in Inverness who fly that route all the time - for them, any HST route that stops at Edinburgh is just a waste of their tax. Forr me, even if I can get to St Pancras in as little as 3 hours (plus stops.....), then if it's going to take me another couple of hours to get to Bristol thn I'll fly direct.

For Lunnuners who want to get to Paris for a mucky week-end (when otherwise they would have stayed at home with a lowered carbon footprint), HST's make sense. For the rest of the UK it's just another example of Lunnun-centric planning and cash flushing.

and always remember to factor in transfer times.

Edinburgh Waverley - Gyle business park - 45 minutes.
Edinburgh Airport - Gyle business park - 10 minutes.

Canary Wharf - City Airport - 10 minutes.
Canary Wharf - St Pancras - who cares?

 

[Firky]

How does Maglev compare in terms of energy consumption?

Eletric trains require an awful lot of juice as it is but I would have thought that maglev require less as their is no friction apart from drag.

 

[WouldBe]

Eletric trains require an awful lot of juice as it is but I would have thought that maglev require less as their is no friction apart from drag.

Depends on how much is needed to make the train levitate which could be loads more.

 

[Crispy]

According to http://www.o-keating.com/hsr/maglev.htm air resistance is the dominant force at high speeds (which makes sense, as it goes up with the square of speed), so the energy efficiency is only marginally better with maglev.

 

[Firky]

But the cool factor is... hey ya, shake it like a polaroid.

There's also less moving parts - so less things to go wrong and big solid steel wheels and other parts will use loads of energy to make. Where as there is little to go wrong with the under carriage of maglev trains I would have thought. It is essentially a series of magnets being turned on and off very fast.

So they could from that point of view me more efficient?

 

[WouldBe]

According to http://www.o-keating.com/hsr/maglev.htm air resistance is the dominant force at high speeds (which makes sense, as it goes up with the square of speed), so the energy efficiency is only marginally better with maglev.

Is it possible to use induced magnetic fields in solid rails to provide the repulsion and use a dual pantograph to get the power from over head cables?

That way the track would be a lot cheaper.

 

[Crispy]

Yes, I suppose from a maintenance POV, they're better.

Thing is, despite the technology being pretty much perfected now, nobody's building them. The costs just don't add up somewhere.

Plus, they're very inflexible. You can't join them in with the rest of the network, and you can't repurpose them. If the lights go off tomorrow, the rails will still be there and steam powered/whatever could go back on them. Steel tracks are a better investment, in the long term, if you ask me.

 

[Crispy]

Is it possible to use induced magnetic fields in solid rails to provide the repulsion and use a dual pantograph to get the power from over head cables?

That way the track would be a lot cheaper.

My hunch is that it would take much more power to induce a current, and then a field, than it would to create the field directly.

 

[MikeMcc]

But the cool factor is... hey ya, shake it like a polaroid.

There's also less moving parts - so less things to go wrong and big solid steel wheels and other parts will use loads of energy to make. Where as there is little to go wrong with the under carriage of maglev trains I would have thought. It is essentially a series of magnets being turned on and off very fast.

So they could from that point of view me more efficient?

The magnets have to be so powerful that they use some pretty wierd materials. They use a hell of a lot of energy to make, and some energy just to maintain the ride height from the rail. They are not overly efficient, just very, very fast.

 

[Xanadu]

Jesus wept... isnt the speed of sound in air 330mph? If you were on the tracks, and the driver pulled his horn when he saw you, the train would hit you before you heard the horn blow...

Maybe I'm mistaken here, but wouldn't the speed of sound relative to the observer be something like 330mi/hr + 330metres/sec?

 

[MikeMcc]

Maybe I'm mistaken here, but wouldn't the speed of sound relative to the observer be something like 330mi/hr + 330metres/sec?

750-760mph (330-340ms-1)depending on the air pressure.

 

[Firky]

The magnets have to be so powerful that they use some pretty wierd materials. They use a hell of a lot of energy to make, and some energy just to maintain the ride height from the rail. They are not overly efficient, just very, very fast.

hhmm, there's probably a report somewhere with a nice tidy conclusion to it all!

 

[Sunray]

I actually disgree, its a lot cheaper to improve the infrastructure in a bit city like London than it is to create new infrastructure.

Cities are one of human kinds great achievements. Its very effecient use of resources in a city, people walk much further in London. Transport is 1/2 decent so people tend to use trains and buses instead of their cars.

yeah, but if you start looking at the costs of other projects that may well not be needed if you had a proper high speed link, it's not actually that bad value for money.

for instance m1 widening from london to leeds = £5.125bn
then you've got the inevitable eventual widening of the A1 from Leeds - Newcastle (to become a full 3 lane motorway) and Newcastle - Edinburgh (to become at least dual carriageway all the way), which must be another £2 billion or so.

It could also potentially reduce demand for internal flights along the route, thereby reducing the need for airport expansion.

but the main economic advantage comes from the potential to reduce the demand for housing in london and the south east. With journey times from the north being under 90 mins it should really open up the possibility of people and businesses choosing to locate in the north, knowing that they can still get to london in 90 mins if needed, and europe via the channel tunnel in 3 hours or so.

The costs of building on the massive scale currently planned in the south east have IMO been massively underestimated. Putting hundreds of thousands of new houses into the already overcrowded south east is madness. The amount of additional infrastructure that will be needed to accomodate that number of extra people is bound to be huge and costly. There's already huge water shortages in the south east, and the planned level of expansion will inevitably mean the need to pipe in water from the north, plus increased pressure on the road network, schools, sewage systems, hospitals etc etc. Much better IMO to improve the transport infrastructure to enable more people to live and work in other areas of the country that don't have these issues.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

According to http://www.o-keating.com/hsr/maglev.htm air resistance is the dominant force at high speeds (which makes sense, as it goes up with the square of speed), so the energy efficiency is only marginally better with maglev.

So, in a small country like the UK, a more sensible option may be to schedule more slow trains on which office-types (and nearly all long-distance commuters are office-types) have the space and facilities to work. That, combined with more days spent working from home - three days in, two at home would work for many commuters. It would take organisation and, to avoid it only being affordable to stock-brokers, subsidy.

Tis a shame, though. We missed out on the bullet train, and this would be the chance to skip a generation of technology.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I actually disgree, its a lot cheaper to improve the infrastructure in a bit city like London than it is to create new infrastructure.

Cities are one of human kinds great achievements. Its very effecient use of resources in a city, people walk much further in London. Transport is 1/2 decent so people tend to use trains and buses instead of their cars.

Yes, this is true. A big problem in the UK is that generally we're not good at living in blocks of flats, so cities quickly start to sprawl.

 

[hipipol]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30051961