More than fifty years ago, Japan invented high-speed rail with iconic Bullet Trains that could operate at more than 200km per hour. The Bullet Train transformed Japan, and kick started a revolution in high-speed rail around the world. Once again, the Japanese are setting out to do it again and this time by building a new kind of train that will operate at an incredible 500km per hour.
The world's fastest train will connect Japan's two largest cities and it will be faster than flying. Covering the 400km distance in just 67 minutes but this is also one of the most expensive transport projects in history.
The first Bullet Trains started in 1964, Japanese engineers were already working on a radical new way of train, with cutting edge rail technologies, bullet trains could operate at speeds that no we can’t thought, while there was still plenty of room to get them to go even faster, engineers realized that at some point, trains would hit a speed limit. To go much extra ordinary fast and furious, they would need a new type of train. So, to eliminate rail friction, engineers would get rid of wheels altogether, instead use magnetic force to levitate the train inside a guide-way.
Although the solution seemed radical, the idea of magnetically levitating a train had been around since the early 1900's. Among early experiments with Maglevs (a system of train transportation that uses two sets of magnets), Germany and Japan, both of these invest heavily in unique versions of the technology. By the 1980's, prototype maglevs were making headlines, breaking speed records, and promising to revolutionize railways. But it would be more than twenty years before the first high-speed maglev would see commercial operation.
It wasn't until 2004, with the opening of the Shanghai Transrapid, that maglevs had finally overtaken conventional rail as the fastest trains in the world. On the line connecting Shanghai with its airport, maglevs based on Germany's technology routinely reach 430 km per hour.
There were once ambitious plans to build high-speed maglevs around the world with some even predicting that North America alone would see thousands of kilometers constructed by the 2020's but plans never materialized, the problem is Maglevs are expensive. Compared to conventional high-speed rail lines, they cost anywhere from 2 to 3 times more to build and they don't work with existing infrastructure.
The world's first intercity maglev line, being built by the Central Japan Railway Company, will connect the country's two largest cities. Just like the first Bullet Trains did in 1964, but today, where it takes two and a half hours for the fastest Bullet Trains to travel between Tokyo and Osaka, the new maglev line will gives you just sixty seven minutes.
The existing Shinkansen (bullet train) already carries nearly half a million passengers every single day. But with Bullet Trains often spaced just three minutes apart, it’s reaching its limit. The infrastructure of the bullet trains which is now almost more than fifty years old and the existing line also runs through the most earthquake prone regions of Japan.
The maglev line will instead take a more direct and straight route between the major cities through a much less seismically active mountain range and that means more than eighty percent of the line will run through tunnels, some of which will be more than twenty km long and a kilometer and a half below the surface. It’s expected that the first section will be open in 2027 with the remaining connection to Osaka completed a decade later.
Japan's high speed intercity maglevs will be the fastest way to travel between japan s major cities, even faster than flying. Making such eye-watering speeds possible is a technology that's been in development for over 50 years. It’s called SCMaglev (Superconducting). To levitate trains off their guide-way, electromagnets are cooled to extreme temperatures in order to take advantage of a phenomenon called superconductivity, which significantly increases magnetic force. The train's electromagnets interact with coils embedded inside a guide-way. One set of coils is used to propel the train while the other is for levitation and guidance. The second set of coils is unpowered. It means SCMaglevs must first accelerate on wheels to 150 km/h, before they can induce a magnetic field to levitate. But once up to speed, the trains are dynamically stable.
The trains are also fully autonomous, controlled not by a driver, but by the track, it means that the collisions are almost impossible and with three separate braking systems, they can also stop faster than conventional trains.
This project is already the most expensive in Japan’s history, much of it owing to the amount of tunneling required, but also the cost of building entirely new stations next to or below existing ones.
This is new train by Japanese straight out of the future and it will be the most ambitious implementation of maglev technology.
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