Here’s a follow-up to the previous entry, a video that looks like it was originally a news clip. It details the Japanese effort, shows how the technology works, and includes lots of footage of the prototype train racing along its 18-kilometer test track. The clip is several years old, and a little pessimistic on the funding issue, but it’s neat stuff…
[Update: I’ve found another one, a compilation of home-video clips shot by curious tourists, several of them from ground level, right alongside the track, so you can really get a sense of the speed and relative quiet of this machine. It’s on the other side of the break…]
This is really cool!
Some years ago Ruthie uncle Spike role me that researchers at Virginia Tech were experimenting with magnetic acceleration automobiles. Apparently they installed magnets in a stretch of ordinary street around Blacksburg and drove a specially designed car around. I don’t know how successful it ever was, but I’ll try to find some information on it.
Now I’m no physicist, but does this technology require electricity (I mean for the propulsion system itself, not for interior lighting and such). Could this be the clean transportation revolution we’re hoping for?
Ruthie has an uncle Spike? I have so got to think of a good joke related to that for next time I talk to her…
As I understand it, the magnets involved in these trains are electromagnets – you do need a source of electricity for the levitation and propulsion effect. I have no idea where that source would be, onboard the train itself or beamed along the tracks somehow. My guess would be the latter, in which case it could be generated by any number of sources. A clean revolution? Probably not… but depending on where the electricity comes from — a coal plant, wind farm, or something else — it would be cleaner than diesel-powered conventional trains.
Oh, and please do send me whatever you find about that Virginia Tech experiment. That sounds really interesting…
The only information I can find reports that students were developing prototypes as recently as 2001. But I couldn’t find anything on a major ongoing research program, which is what I assumed this was. I’ll have to ask Spike about it.
Spike is, of course, a nickname (nicknames stick in the South). He’s a lot of fun–an enthusiastic family man and fly fisherman.
Dare I ask how he acquired this particular nickname? It sounds… ominous. But I may just be associating it with the character Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was a vampire who earned his nickname (and a reputation for unspeakable cruelty) by torturing his victims with railroad spikes before draining their blood.
God, I am such a dork…