- Chapter 4 -
- Maglev: The Technology of the 21st Century -
From downtown Boston, 450 miles to the center of the
nation's capital, Washington D.C., in 90 minutes, at
prices cheaper than Amtrak's {Metroliner}? For
the more than 1 million people who make that journey
every year by air, this may seem like a fantasy. But it
isn't. Such is the prospect which lies before us early
in the 21st century, if we implement Lyndon LaRouche's
program for invetsment in magnetic levitation (maglev)
transport systems.
Here's what such a trip would be like. Passengers
arrive at Boston's main station via a network of maglev
commuter lines, at more than 50 miles per hour, shortly
before the scheduled 7:30 a.m. departure of the morning
express service to Washington, D.C., perhaps to be
known as {The 21st Century Unlimited.} There
are no worries about traffic jams or parking spaces. On
board, passengers relax in quiet comfort, while
{The Unlimited} accelerates at nearly three
feet per second per second to a cruising speed of about
300 mph.
Following a re-engineered route from Boston to
Providence, R.I., and then along the Connecticut
coastal strip, (see map) the first, and only stop, New
York City, would be at about 8:15 a.m. From there,
{The Unlimited} would speed toward Washington,
D.C., along roughly the same path Amtrak's
{Metroliner} now follows, arriving at around
9:00 a.m., the beginning of the working day.
- A New American Railroad -
Sound far-fetched, like science fiction? Outside
the United States, maglev train systems are fast
becoming reality. Germany has such a system ready, now,
for commercial application. Japan will also, before the
end of the decade. Rapid development of maglev
technology for the U.S.A., and the construction of a
maglev transportation network, will be a cornerstone of
the LaRouche administration's transportation policy for
the United States, without waiting for any more
wasteful cost-benefit analyses from the bureaucrats.
A high-speed line through the dense population
concentrations of the Eastern Seaboard would be the
first part of the new national network. To help revive
manufacturing in the nation's heartland--the area
bounded by Lake Erie and Michigan to the north, the
Illinois River to the west, and the Ohio River system
to the south and east--LaRouche would also drive lines
westward, through Buffalo, N.Y. in the north, and
Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania. These would connect
the industrial centers along the shores of Lake
Ontario, Lake Michigan, and Lake Erie, and central
Ohio, with the East Coast and the Chicago-northern
Indiana industrial belt.
The 900-mile journey from New York to Chicago
would be completed in three hours--city center to city
center. Intermediate stops on the southern route would
include Pittsburgh, Columbus or Dayton, Ohio, and on to
Chicago through Union City, Marion, and Peru in
Indiana. The northern route would pass from Boston
through Albany, Rochester, and Buffalo in New York,
Cleveland and Toledo in Ohio, then across the southern
Michigan peninsula, and Gary, Indiana to Chicago (map).
The next step in construction of the new American
railroad would be north-south lines to connect the
cities of the Lake Shore belt with the cities of the
Ohio Valley, and points farther south and west.
- In Germany and Japan -
High-speed maglev transportation systems are
already being built in Germany and Japan. In Germany,
the Transrapid system has received government approval
for commercial operations. Its first phase will connect
the airports of Cologne-Bonn and Duesseldorf, and later
Essen. The Transrapid soon expects approval for
mainline, intercity operations. This program is about
seven years ahead of the the maglev program in Japan,
where the MLU system is scheduled to begin transporting
passengers in the densely populated 320-mile
Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka corridor by the end of the decade.
Germany and Japan have also developed systems such
as the M-Bahn, the 50 mph magnetically levitated urban
transit system, which functions in Berlin, and the HSST
Corporation's systems, which have provided vehicles for
exposition sites in Tsukba and Yokohama in Japan, and
Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. Maglev
technology is already set to meet a family of
transportation functions, from short-distance, but
relative high-speed urban commutes--Japan's HSST can
function at between 60 and 250 mph--to intercity travel
at speeds in excess of 310 mph.
The Transrapid TR-07 is capable of carrying up to
200 passengers at speeds of up to 310 mph. With a
one-minute headway between units, Germany's TR-07 can
transport between 10,000 and 20,000 people per hour.
Japan's commercial design maglev train will consist of
14 cars capable of carrying 900 passengers, and is
intended to move 75-100,000 people per day between
Tokyo and Osaka.
Maglev is set to revolutionize passenger and
freight transportation worldwide by early in the next
century, just as the steam engine revolutionized
transportation more than 150 years ago. Given the
spinoffs which will follow the development of the
transportation systems themselves, such as impetus
given to so-called ``high-temperature'' superconductor
scientific research, the effect will be even more
profound.
- Made in the U.S.A. -
And where is the United States in all this?
Precisely nowhere. It will take a President of the
stature of a Kennedy or a Roosevelt to organize the
catch-up required, without whining about ``unfair
competition.'' After all, these maglev trains are
nothing but modern versions of a technology outlined by
U.S. space pioneer Louis Goddard early in the 20th
century.
The linear electric motor, the power source for
all current maglev prototypes, was developed in the
U.S.A. under a Federal Railroad Administration program
sponsored under the High Speed Ground Transportation
Act of 1965. In 1971, contracts were awarded the Ford
Motor Company and Stanford Research Institute for
experimental development of maglev power sources.
Low-speed propulsion systems for cities were advanced
by Rohr Industries, with Boeing taking up the
development rights. In 1974, a world speed record of
255.4 mph was set by a prototype linear induction motor
vehicle at the Department of Transportation's Pueblo,
Colorado test facility.
Just one year later, in 1975, federal funding for
the program was cut, when the Ford administration and
Congress allowed the 1965 act to lapse. At least 10
years ahead of the rest of the world at the time, the
United States is now completely out of the running.
LaRouche is the President to make up for the lost time.
- Maglev Systems -
Maglev systems feature two basic types of
propulsion and guidance systems: those in which the
systems are onboard the vehicles, such as Japan's HSST
models, and those which are propelled and controlled
from the track on which the vehicles run, known as the
guideway. Both the German TR-07 and the Japanese
MLU-002 models make use of what are called passive
systems. However, the German and Japanese programs make
use of different electromagnetic principles to provide
the suspension, propulsion, and guidance of their
vehicles.
The German Transrapid is based on the attractive
power of magnetic forces, a system called
Electromagnetic Suspension ({Figure 1}). The
vehicle's underframe ``wraps around'' the guideway and
pushes the vehicle up and off its rails. The Japanese
make use of repulsive forces, a system called
Electrodynamic Suspension ({Figure 2}), to lift
the vehicle away from the guideway. These systems must
employ an undercarriage-like landing-gear, for lift-off
and landing, because the vehicles only levitate at
speeds in excess of 25 mph.
The system's potential is completely obscured by
the cost-benefit analysis idiocies tolerated in the
United States--which have been used to destroy our
nation's infrastructure and speed our transformation
into a malthusian, post-industrial society. Comparable
in effective travel time over distances from 200 to 900
miles with aircraft, a maglev unit can carry twice the
passengers at half the cost of a plane such as today's
Boeing 737. The system is cheaper than the movement of
passengers on today's railroad system. Best estimates
of maglev operating and maintenance costs per
passenger-mile are 5.2@ct in 1988 dollars. This is
vastly less than the passenger-mile cost of today's
{Metroliner}, figured at between 16.2@ct and
36@ct, depending on book-keeping methods used.
Maglev systems would actually pay for
themselves--in wasted passenger-hours saved. Estimates
are that $40 billion of economic value is lost to
traffic delays in the nation's eight most congested
urban centers--a sum which could finance the
construction of 3,000 miles of maglev rail networks
every year. The industries and jobs which will be
created to build such a national system will return far
more, in increased productivity, and permanent
improvements to the nation's depleted capital stock, as
will the network itself, than the construction will
ever cost.
As President, Lyndon LaRouche will use such
industries as the leading edge of an export drive, in
which the United States will begin shipping
state-of-the-art capital goods to help the nations of
the Southern Hemisphere develop the economic
infrastructure they need to prosper in the 21st
century. The jobs and industries LaRouche creates,
under his New American Railroad maglev program, will be
here to stay.
----
John Covici
[email protected]
