Maglev does not imply “monorail”. Maglev is short for “magnetic levitation”. Instead of getting constantly jarred from all the joints in the rails, you have a smooth ride. Monorail has all the stability advantages of a motorcycle. A dual-rail system is far better.
And how fast do we need the trains to go? Well, if we’re going to replace most air travel, people need to go from New York to Los Angeles overnight. Mapquest says that’s 2784 miles – 42 hours by car. At the 220 MPH that “high speed trains” are operating at in Spain, that’s a 13-hour trip. At those speeds, people will continue to use airplanes.
The Japanese bullet trains reach speeds of 275 MPH for conventional trains, and 350 MPH for maglev. An overnight trip, with 8 hours of sleep and an hour on each end to handle personal hygiene, means we need to average about 275 MPH – and since there’s a very real difference between peak speed and average speed, we need the extra speed of maglev, as well as the extra comfort.
Yes, we’re talking about a dedicated rail network. There are sections of the South Shore Railroad where the tracks are so bad that trains have to slow down to bicycle speeds in order to keep from derailing. That’s acceptable if you’re hauling coal to a power plant or grain to market, but it won’t cut the mustard if you’re trying to replace air travel. Even if the tracks were good, fast freight is too expensive for bulk freight cargoes, and even fast freight is too slow for long-distance trains to share the same tracks.
Yes, the interurbans of a century ago failed economically, when they tried to compete against cars, but so did conventional trains. That’s why we have Amtrak, constantly operating in the red.
The system needs to be modeled after San Francisco’s BART people-movers. There’s no need to switch cars from one end of your trip to another – everybody on the car is headed to the same destination, the same as with an airplane, and the computer automatically operates the switches so that every journey is nonstop.
The only flights out of Lancaster are Cape Air, and they only go to Baltimore. There’s no reason to expect a maglev to Chicago from here. If you need to fly to Chicago, you take Cape Air to BWI, then catch a connecting flight to O’Hare. Similarly, if you wanted to take the maglev to Chicago, you’d have to take Amtrak to Philly and catch the maglev from there. Or maybe you’d take Cape Air to BWI and take the maglev from there to Chicago.
The problem with the existing train system is that it’s cheap to build, but it’s damnably expensive to operate.
To send an employee by train from Penn Station (NYP) in New York to Union Station (LAX) in Los Angeles, he leaves at 6:45 AM on Wednesday, spend 5 hours in Chicago as he switch trains, and he doesn’t arrive until Saturday morning at 8:15, for a fare of $303. Alternatively, he could hop on a Virgin Air flight at 11:30 Friday morning, and be there at 3 PM Friday afternoon, for a fare of $93. The fare doesn’t even matter – if the train was free, the wages for the employee would make the flight cheaper.
Or consider the family of four heading to Disney World. ‘You can’t get there from here’ right now, because CSX is doing track work. But even if you could, you’d be talking about spending 24 hours in your seats – pretty rough travel for your kids. That’s no way to start a vacation – or end one, either. Catch AirTrans from BWI, and it’s just 2 hours, 23 minutes.
But a trip on a smooth, nearly silent maglev vehicle while sleeping (going from NYC to LA) or watching TV (here to Orlando) would be competitive to air travel.
Amtrak is about commuting. It competes with cars – only it can’t. A maglev system is about long-distance transportation. It competes with airplanes – and it can.
