They were invented decades ago.

They have fewer moving parts than wheelbois.

They require less maintenance.

There’s obviously some bottleneck in expanding maglev technology, but what is it?

  • markr [he/him, any]
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    fedilink
    English
    610 months ago

    I rode the maglev to the shanghai airport, it was awesome. The newer version in Beijing is significantly faster. But yeah super expensive to build.

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏
      link
      110 months ago

      How was the ride? Smooth/bumpy/not feel much movement?

      My experience on a much slower HSR is being thrown around in the seat at certain times, wouldn’t want to be carrying an open drink of any kind tbh lol

      • @sunbeam60
        link
        310 months ago

        The maglev is Shanghai is super smooth.

        TGV in France is super smooth. Maybe not quite as smooth but still smooth enough that you can have a tall bottle or glass on a table without fear it’ll fall over.

        Then you’ve got a couple of places in Europe that hits 300 km/h, or near enough: Köln-Frankfurt and parts of the München-Berlin in Germany, Barcelona-Madrid and the Eurostar. All of these are super smooth.

        The rest is just “high speed” marketing, sometimes done on tilting trains that’ll hit 250 km/h. The ones I’ve tried are not super smooth. Parts of the “higher speed” tilting trains in the U.K. are downright uncomfortable and can leave you travel sick at times.