<story><title>Japanese railway operator to license maglev tech to US for free</title><url>http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japanese-railway-operator-to-offer-maglev-tech-to-US-for-free</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>I think the problem with the US railway system is not the lack of technology, but politics: People seem to love bold and mostly unrealistic proposals like Elon Musk&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Hyperloop&amp;quot; or the Maglev technology but seem to be a lot less passionate about making existing infrastructure better (which understandably is much more boring):&lt;p&gt;As an example, I just took the Amtrak train from NYC to Montreal to attend PyCon (which is awesome!), which took all in all 11 hours to cover a distance a little over 530 km. For comparison, going from my hometown Saarbrücken in Germany to Paris (which is about the same distance) takes less than two hours (1:40h to be exact) with TGV or ICE trains. Arguably for the latter there is no border to be crossed (OK actually there is but none that is patroled) but still, this kind of makes you wonder why a high-tech nation like the USA doesn&amp;#x27;t have a similar system of high-speed trains in place, and I think that the answer has more to do with political unwillingness and lobbying than with lack of technology.&lt;p&gt;BTW, in Germany there once was an attempt to build a Transrapid (our version of Maglev that is deployed in Shanghai, developed by Siemens &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Transrapid&lt;/a&gt;) track to connect the Munich airport to the city centre (see &amp;quot;Munich Link&amp;quot; section in the article above), but calculations showed that the achievable time saving compared to the latest generation of ICE high-speed trains would be only 3 minutes, whereas the additional cost would have been around 3 BN €, which lead to the project being eventually ditched.</text></comment>
<story><title>Japanese railway operator to license maglev tech to US for free</title><url>http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japanese-railway-operator-to-offer-maglev-tech-to-US-for-free</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arrrg</author><text>The technology has existed for so long but never really went anywhere. After half a century there are 30km in Shanghai, that’s all.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it will work out better in the future.&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem I see is that the gains of this technology would be rather small anywhere with conventional high-speed rail or existing infrastructure that can be upgraded to that. With Maglev everything needs to be built from scratch. That’s just not very attractive for any place that has consistently expanded its rail network ever since the height of the industrial revolution.&lt;p&gt;And for what? A 180km&amp;#x2F;h faster train? I personally very much want that, sure, but is it worth it for anyone building it? I’m pretty sure I know the answer in Western Europe (though I can always hope that maglev has a future there), I’m not so sure when it comes to the US.</text></comment>