Transportation Bill Sets Aside $45 Million For MagLev Train

tbischel tips us to news that the MagLev train project which would run from Las Vegas to Disneyland has received approval for $45 million in funding. The project has been in the planning stages for quite some time, and it was delayed further by a drafting error in a 2005 highway bill. "Derided by critics as pie in the sky, the train would use magnetic levitation technology to carry passengers from Disneyland to Las Vegas in well under two hours, traveling at speeds of up to 300 mph. It would be the first MagLev system in the U.S. The money is the largest cash infusion in the project's nearly 20-year history. It will pay for environmental studies for the first leg of the project."

Bizarre

[jdub_dub]

So a route which was cancelled because of low ridership... is getting the most expensive trainset in the country?

drop in the bucket

[thefirelane]

They shouldn't waste the money to even begin looking at such an idea. Just take a look at the Transrapid project [wikipedia.org] that was recently scrapped in Germany. For roughly 40km of track, linking Munich and the Airport, the final cost projection came out to 3 billion euros ($4.7268 billion)! What a waste.

Re:Critics

[LaskoVortex]

Really? I am from Europe, and just have to wonder...

Such a rail between LV and LA would be useful. This is a popular commute, both for recreation and business.

Re:Critics

[Gregory Arenius]

Disney land is in the LA Metro area which has a population of about 13,000,000 people while LV has a metro area of about 1,700,000 people. Most of the land between the two is desert while most of the land between DC and NYC is populated making a right of way much more difficult to obtain there. The way the summary states that it connects to Disneyland, while possibly true, is really designed to be deceptive. It would have been much more honest if it said connects to LA and LV. There exists a huge amount of both car and air traffic between the two cities. Even with the high price of gas and a recent expansion of the highway between the two cities the roads are still clogged. While I don't know if maglev is the right technology a solid case for high speed rail between LA and NV can certainly be made.

Cheers,
Greg

Re:Previous train route cancelled due to low useag

[Mike1024]

45 Mil for the environmental study for a already failed train route? I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

You ain't seen nothing yet. This is a 250 mile train track [usatoday.com] - That's 400km - while the Japanese Linimo [wikipedia.org] maglev cost $100 million per km (for 9km) while the Shanghai Maglev Train [wikipedia.org] cost $1.33 billion for 30.5 km - $43 million per km.

The French LGV Est [wikipedia.org] is 300 km and cost 4 billion euros - $6 billion. $21 million a mile.

Or if you look at the British London-to-channel-tunnel rail link, it cost £5.2 billion ($10 billion) for 108 km [wikipedia.org] - $100 million a mile.

Even if economies of scale get the price down to $10 million per km the cost will be $4 billion.

Re:Previous train route cancelled due to low useag

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the high cost of the French and British projects is due to traversing rich farming land and densely populated eras, that required lots of bridges and tunnels to cross all the existing roads, plus expensive negociations with existing land owners (because a fast track needs to be straight so you're pretty committed to paid the price to cross whatever is on this line)

I really don't think the desert around LV has the same constrains.

Of course, by choosing maglev instead of conventional track it's very possible they'll manage a higher per-mile cost in the desert than the European paid to cross posh Riviera lands.

Re:Infrastructure problems in the East prohibit

[Skater]

Of note, there are multiple at-grade crossings on this trains route - these are rarely found on other high speed train lines for obvious reasons.

No there aren't. During the Great Depression, the Pennsylvania Railroad spent a ton of money to improve the DC-NYC Northeast Corridor to eliminate all at-grade crossings. There are a few at-grade crossings north of New York (closer to Boston, actually), but that's not the section of the line you were talking about.

Re:Huge construction project.. recession..

[Skater]

Won't happen. It'd be nice but it won't happen.

I read Trains magazine religiously each month. This month there was an article about a train (Amtrak) that Missouri pays for to run between St. Louis and Kansas City (IIRC). Ridership on the train was very good, but unfortunately the track it uses has a lot of freight trains as well, so the Amtrak trains are frequently late, and ridership is declining. Missouri did a study and found that it'd cost $45 million to improve the line, and they allocated $10 million to double track a few sections.

Meanwhile, as the article points out, if Missouri instead decided to build a 6-lane highway, the federal gov't would kick in 80% of the funding.

Sanity. It just won't happen.

Re:Previous train route cancelled due to low useag

[zippthorne]

I looked into that once. It was much cheaper to drive. Which made me very suspicious about the petro-economics of the whole deal.

The problem is that you have to buy a ticket for you car that's already more expensive than food, fuel, and lodging for the trip. Then you have to also buy a ticket for yourself, which is half again as expensive as the last ticket. Then you still have to take care of your meals.

And it gets much, much worse if you are a group of people.

A family of four would pay almost an order of magnitude less to travel by car.

Re:Previous train route cancelled due to low useag

[Anonymous Coward]

Amtrak does a lot with what they have. Unlike highways they pay taxes on their tracks through fees (roads are tax free and rob the public of the taxes that would have been payed by other uses). They also have their own police force unlike highways. They also have to share the track with freight companies on the west coast at least, making them late.
Of course, cars get all the subsidies so we can go fast in them. To put subsidies in perspective, Amtrak could run for a decade on the money spent on just the "Big Dig" in Boston. All the public money they have ever gotten is about the same as the loans given to the airlines since 9/11. Six days of the Iraq war is about the same as their federal subsidy.

Cars pay their own way though right? Well, they pay that gas tax, which of course doesn't cover the costs of state and local roads. There are registration fees, but those don't usually cover all the costs either. They certainly don't pay for the policing of the roads. Highways are a huge money pit. Nationwide car users underpay by 20-75 cents per dollar, depending on the state. The rest comes from the general fund of the state. So, perhaps what we should do is make drivers pay the full cost of their transportation through direct fees and taxes. Then perhaps we would see the true cost of driving, and perhaps people would drive less. At the very least, people who don't drive much, like myself, would pay fewer taxes.
Amtrak has been crippled on purpose. I think you're right, to make trains look bad to americans. It happened too late, but GM was brought before congress to answer for their part in systematically destroying trolley service in Los Angeles. The auto industry has been waging a war against trains for decades and they are at least a big part of the reason that Amtrak looks incompetent.

The MARC trains (Balt -DC)are quite crowded

[spineboy]

and they run starting around 5:30 AM or so. That's what I used when I lived in BAltimore, and worked in DC

Re:Lots of trains in the USA

[jimicus]

For example, cars are just getting into gas electric hybrids, but the railroads have been running diesel electric hybrids now for decades. The locomotives are now into a new generation of hybrid technology.

They're not hybrids in the same sense of the word. A diesel electric train is basically a dirty great diesel electricity generator which powers an electric motor. There's no drive between diesel engine and wheels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel-electric_locomotive#Diesel-electric [wikipedia.org]

Re:Lots of trains in the USA

[Firethorn]

I wouldn't call it 'dirty'. For a diesel they're quite clean, considering their power and size.

There's no drive between diesel engine and wheels.

I also wouldn't consider a mechanical link between the engine and the wheels a disabling factor for calling it a 'hybrid'. That's how GM is proposing the volt be set up, actually.

What would disable it is that, unlike car hybrids, current generation diesel electrics don't have any significant levels of alternative storage - they can't store energy from stopping to get started again.

Instead, the reason they use the electronics is that it's replacing the transmission - which would actually be more costly, less efficient and break sooner than the electronic setup. Oh, they'll use the electric motors to help them stop, saving brake pads, but instead of going to a battery the energy goes to a resister net on the roof of the locomotive.

Personally, given that trains normally go for non-stop travel, I wonder if it might be better to leave the batteries in the station so the train doesn't have to haul them and electrify the rails, at least in switching yards and such, instead.

Re:Trains, US?

[SuperQ]

How about this:

http://www.bts.gov/publications/freight_in_america/html/table_01.html [bts.gov]

The US moves (by weight):
Truck: 60%
Train: 10%
Boat: 8%
Pipeline: 18%
Mixed-mode: 1%
Other 2%

The interesting thing is the ton-miles table where Trains are much closer to Trucks.

I used to work at a mid-sized auto parts company. We had a fleet of about 20 trucks that would move things from Minnesota to about half of the country, mostly on the east side. I always thought it was fairly in-efficient that we had trucks that would go all the way to Texas instead of driving it into Minneapolis (55 miles), then shipping it via train to Dallas where a local truck would take it to a warehouse for store distribution.

Re:Lots of trains in the USA

[njh]

There are diesel-electric/electric locomotives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-diesel_locomotive [wikipedia.org]

They use them quite a bit in Europe. Europe also has a plethora of voltages (and a choice between 0Hz, 16.7Hz and 50Hz depending on the line). There are locomotives that can tap into any combination. The general trend in the Europe is for electrification reduce the noise and raising the voltage to increase the available power.

Re:Lots of trains in the USA

[Forbman]

...except GE is now making (and selling) a "true" hybrid locomotive. Yes, it has a big battery pack. It's intended to run on batteries for starting out in urban areas and storing some of the energy currently radiated away from regenerative braking.

I think GE and EMD are working on hybrid switchers, too, but along the line of the Chevy Volt: engine runs generator, which keeps battery pack charged, or can provide additional on-demand electrical boost, but running on battery is main source of power, which is opposite of current car hybrid systems, where the battery pack provides the boost.

Re:Infrastructure problems in the East prohibit

[Anonymous Coward]

Horizontal G-forces that would tip a normal train would be rather unpleasant for the occupants even if their train stays on the tracks.

Re:DC-to-Orlando Auto Train

[Migraineman]

I've taken the auto train. It's expensive. Almost all minivans are "oversize vehicles," which cost more. The car carriers are built on a 1970s transportation model where most cars were mid-sized sedans. Amtrak hasn't upgraded it's rolling stock to account for the popularity of the minivans.

We got a 2-bunk cabin, which is much nicer than trying to sleep in the standard coach seats. Overall costs were about $1600 (in 2003,) not including the additional drive from Sanford FL to Sarasota FL. The main benefit of the auto train is being able to do something else - get up, walk around, sit in the lounge car, have a meal, etc.

However, the economics make this a very expensive trip. Travel time is comparable to driving. In today's costs: our Toyota minivan gets 24 MPG. Round trip is about 1200 miles, using 50 gallons of gasoline. At $4 per gallon, fuel costs are $200. The kids won't sit still for 16-hours of driving, so we split the drive into two days. Hotel costs us $150 or so. If we ate at restaurants for three meals each day, add another $200 in food. So driving costs me about $550, or about 1/3 that of taking the Auto Train. It's less expensive to purchase coach seating on the Auto Train, but that's not really an option if you have small kids.

As a straw-man, I'll check prices for a flight+car from DC to Orlando. AirTran will get me four round-trip flights (2x adult, 2x kids) hopping through Atlanta for $900. Total flight time is about 4 hours. I can rent a mid-sized sedan from multiple vendors for under $300/week.

Hopping over to Amtrak's website ... Standard coach fare is $450 plus $514 for the minivan. That's three coach seats - the infant is supposed to be lap-carried. Fat chance of that. Upgrading to the fourth seat for the small monkey brings the fare up to $540+$514 = $1054. Upgrading to the small family bedroom increases the round-trup fare to $2083 total. Tough to justify the Auto Train.

Re:Critics

[xaxa]

Trains can't fall out of the sky, don't carry large quantities of flammable liquids, and can't be usefully hijacked. A bomb is normally only fatal to people nearby. Good design and engineering means even derailing at high speed can be relatively safe [wikipedia.org] (1 fatality), although sometimes you can be very unlucky [wikipedia.org] (train derailed, but just before a bridge. It crashed into the pillars, the bridge collapsed onto some of the train, and the rest ploughed into the remains of the bridge. Bad luck? If it had happened just after the bridge probably no one would have died).

The worst time for a bomb is in a tunnel, when an explosion is forced along the length of the train, rather than out.

Would that convince politicians that they don't need as much security? Who knows.