Transrapid
Transrapid is a German monorail system using magnetic levitation. Based on a patent from 1934, planning of an actual Transrapid system started in 1969. The test facility for the system in Emsland, Germany was completed in 1987, and in 1989 a Transrapid train reached a record-breaking speed of 436 kilometers per hour. The system is developed and marketed by Siemens and ThyssenKrupp.
The Transrapid is said to be more energy efficient than a standard train and considerably less noisy. This is chiefly due to the absence of friction between train and track. (However, for high-speed trains in general, most energy is consumed to overcome air friction, as it scales, other than the wheels' friction, with the square of the velocity.) It is also capable of climbing significantly steeper tracks, rendering it especially suitable for mountainous regions. However, track building costs are much higher than for conventional high-speed trains, the track alters the landscape considerably (and not to the better, in the opinion of many people living near proposed routes) and the Transrapid trains are limited in length to a few long cars; moreover, only one train can exist at any time in each (long) section of the track.
The Transrapid originated as one of the competing concepts for new land based high speed public transportation for Germany. Another competing concept was the ICE. The ICE "won" in that it was adopted nationwide in Germany. It is argued that the ICE won out in part because of its ability to run on conventional tracks (albeit not at full speeds). Nevertheless, for some reason Transrapid development was not scrapped at this point, but continued as well (though the train was not adopted nationwide).
However, in the 1990s, intense political discussions about the Transrapid started in Germany. Though technically superior to normal railroad systems, the transrapid was considered too expensive, as the companies developing it relied on federal subsidies. The controversy mostly raged over the question whether (rather large amounts of) public money should be invested into construction of a track for commercial use. Plans for a track from Berlin to Hamburg were cancelled because legislators were not convinced that the project would ever become profitable and hence were unwilling to invest the money in times of tight budgets -- in spite of the alleged importance of having a working Transrapid system in Germany in order to ease the, so far, not very succesfull marketing of the system abroad.
The only success so far was in the year 2000, when the Chinese government ordered a Transrapid track to be build connecting Shanghai to its Pu Dong airport. It was inaugurated in 2002. Regular daily trips had started in March 2004. However, low passenger numbers, due mostly to the relatively high ticket costs, have hampered the line. During the first week, the average number of riders per train was only 73 people out of a maximum seating capacity of 440 passengers. One way trip prices have recently dropped to 50 Renminbi ($6 USD).
The Transrapid manufacturers had high hopes of obtaining a successive order from China for a track connecting Shanghei with Beijing. Hence, it was considered a serious drawback, when China decided, in 2004, for the Japanese high-speed train Shinkansen, to the disappointment of Siemens that hoped to sell at least the ICE which is manufactured by them as the Transrapid system partly is.
In the year 2002, it had been decided that a track connecting the cities of Düsseldorf and Dortmund via the city of Essen should be built with financial help by the federal and Land governments. Later, a second track between the two cities might have been built closing the loop via Wuppertal. This track was expected to be operational in 2007 though it was originally planned to be ready for the 2006 soccer world championship in Germany. However, the project has been cancelled by the involved companies as of June 27th, 2003, after the government set a "take it or leave it" maximum on subsidies.
As an alternative, the proponents of the Transrapid (which include the government of Bavaria) are now, as of 2004, planning to connect the Bavarian capital Munich to its international airport, which is quite far away from the city center. This idea is controversial as well: Although the current connection via S-Bahn (German city railroad system) takes about 40 minutes for the distance, this is mainly due to the train stopping very often in between; a conventional express train on the existing track would be only about 3 minutes slower than the proposed Transrapid.
See also
