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On the fashion show catwalks there's been a sixties revival – and in transport too.
Have you ever noticed how some technologies keep on coming round? We're talking about what the popular press refers to as ‘inventions' and which formed the basis of ‘Tomorrow's World' for so many years.
Airships, for example. There seems to be a regular supply of entrepreneurs willing to back a new- generation airship to fulfil some niche application.
These have ranged from maritime patrol to carrying heavy equipment into remote locations in developing countries. As I write, the London Evening Standard has reported a proposal for an airship service between Central London and the Stratford Olympic complex should London host the Games. If there is a real demand for such a service, it is surely time to revive the Fairey Rotodyne.
What else? Well in the railways we have gas turbine traction.
This is a typically 1960s concept which has never swept the world. When I was young and naïve I actually wrote an article for Modern Railways proposing a Proteus powered successor to the Deltics on the East Coast fuelled with liquefied petroleum gas. It was rejected.
And while gas turbine trains have worked, they have been French and to French engineers, imbued with ‘l'exception Francais', the rest of the world is always technologically out of step – until one day it isn't.
But gas turbines still keep returning – see First Great Western's enthusiasm for the Bombardier locomotive proposal a few years back.
And then there's magnetic levitation – maglev for short. Another child of the 1960s, when every high tech industry was sure that the steel wheel on steel rail was outmoded.
While in Britain we associate maglev with Professor Eric Laithwaite, the Germans claim, with typical precision, that on 14 August 1934 , Herman Kemper was awarded patent number 64 33 16 for a "suspension railway with wheel-less vehicles. Nothing if not far sighted Herr Kemper was proposing to run the vehicles in partially evacuated tubes with a theoretical maximum speed of 1500km/h.
For various reasons Germany was a bit preoccupied for the following 30 years but in 1966 Herr Kemper was taking the cure at Bad Woerishofen, when who should he meet in the pool but Ludwig Boelkow who would become the middle ‘B' of MBB (Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm). And while the German tanks-to-trains group Krauss Maffei built a working model in 1969, called Transrapid, it was MBB which demonstrated the world's first passenger carrying maglev vehicle in May 1971. Krauss Maffei then levitated Transrapid 02 in December 1971 on a 930m test track, subsequently reaching 164km/h.
Tracked Air Cushion Vehicles were all the rage at the time, so K-M also built an air cushion Transrapid 03. Tests on the same track confirmed that TACV was a non starter.
As we found in Britain, after spending around £40million in modern money on the Tracked Hovercraft Ltd TACV venture, including the 5km guideway at Earith near Cambridge. Test vehicle RTV31 reached 167km/h there in February 1973: a week later the project was cancelled
Back in Germany , in 1974, a Government-inspired merger of the two research teams took place. The joint company was called Transrapid EMS. But it wasn't just the ex-Wehrmacht suppliers looking for new outlets. In parallel, Siemens, Brown Boveri and AEG developed their own maglev system using superconducting magnets.
Next, MBB, Krauss Maffei and Thyssen Henschel (do try to keep up) ran a 70 seat vehicle called Transrapid 05 on a 900 m guideway at the 1979 Hanburg International Transport Exhibition. Development then moved to a 31.5km elevated test track in Emsland.
By now, of course, the high speed rail renaissance had begun. High speed trains became champions of national technology, pitting the French Ligne a Grande Vitesse against German Neubaustrecke.
And France Limited has won hands down . So, on the basis of ‘if you can't beat them play another game', Germany adopted Transrapid as the new national high speed land transport champion, hoping to leapfrog the steel wheel.
Traditionally, you need a demonstrator in the home market to sell new technology. And, following German reunification, a Hamburg-Berlin maglev line was planned.
But in February 2000 the Transport Ministry binned the project. It was clear that the line was not financially viable and neither Government, manufacturing industry nor German Railway (DB) was prepared to commit the funding to keep it going. Instead the existing Hamburg-Berlin line would be upgraded.
However, Transrapid was a national flagship and by now the Government had spent an estimated DM2bn (at two to the pound) on development. So the Transport Minister announced that there would be other, cheaper, schemes to exploit this jewel in the German technical crown.
Two face saving Transrapid projects emerged. Metrorapid was a Euros 3.2bn 79km line between Dortmund and Dusseldorf . The other was a Euros 1.6 billion 37km airport link for Munich . Central government offered to provide Euros 1.75 billion for the Ruhr project and Euros 550 million for the airport link
In June 2003 the Land of Nordrhein-Westfalen decided that a Dortmund Cologne S-Bahn at Euros 1.8billion was a better bet than Metrorapid, making it two-nil for the steel wheel on rail in the German transport league. If funds can be found work on the Munich Airport link might start in 2009.
Munich Airport management favours, as a precursor to maglev (naturlich), an express S-Bahn that would cut the travel time to the city centre to less than 30 minutes ‘for a relatively modest investment'. On the basis that some of the railway's greatest successes have been stop-gaps, I reckon the ‘precursor' would kill off its putative successor.
Without a home market, Transrapid was hawked around the world in search of a launch application. Eventually, in June 2000, China ordered a 31km system linking Shanghai airport with Pudong on the outskirts of the city centre. Running at a maximum speed of 430km/h, this opened in December 2003.
However, the real prize in China was the proposed 1337km line between Shanghai and Beijing where the Government had been comparing maglev and high speed rail for some time. Transrapid expected the Shanghai contract to lead on to a maglev network linking China 's major cities.
But there was a snag. As a Vice Chairman of Siemens Transportation systems put it in April 2002, ‘The choice ( Shanghai maglev) of the Chinese Government needs to be vindicated'. In other words, the Chinese were already feeling out on a limb. They would only be reassured if Germany used its own wundertechnik.
Meanwhile, within China there was a mini power- struggle, with the Ministry of Science & Technology favouring maglev for Shanghai-Beijing and the Ministry of Railways preferring the steel wheel. In January 2004, it was announced that the Chinese Government had approved a plan for medium and long term development of the national rail network, including high speed rail for a new Beijing-Shanghai route.
One of the reasons for the choice was the incompatibility of maglev with the existing rail network. Over 60% of the trains on the route serve other areas. And the Chinese, who built most of the infrastructure for Shanghai system, claim that maglev is twice the cost per km of conventional high speed rail.
Now, China will not build any more urban maglev projects until the Shanghai line has been ‘fully evaluated'. According to Zhou Yimin, the Vice President of the expert committee on urban rail transit of the National Development & Reform Commission, quoted in Railway Gazette International, ‘We need some time now to operate the system and see if it is truly suitable for Chinese usage'.
Mr Zhou pointed out that while there is ‘a lot of research' in the United States and Germany , ‘No one is running their own real life maglev system apart from us'. He will be looking at long term feasibility metrics in Shanghai and, reflecting the vulnerability of those who promoted the scheme, is ‘also hoping to see a proper commercial maglev system running in Munich so we will have someone to compare results with'.
Which brings us to Ultraspeed UK , which is promoting Transrapid for the UK 's putative North-South High Speed Line. The scheme is based on a route linking London and Glasgow via Birmingham , Manchester , Leeds , Teesside, Newcastle , and Edinburgh . In general the ‘city' stops would be at airports.
Around £2millon has been spent developing the scheme. The promoters claim that Ultraspeed vehicles could operate ‘as frequently as every 10 minutes'. Sample journey times quoted are:
London to Birmingham – 30 minutes
Newcastle to Leeds – 25 minutes
Glasgow to Edinburgh Airport – 11 minutes
Heathrow to Tyneside serving the major cities en route – 100 minutes
London would have termini at Heathrow Airport and Stratford plus a parkway on the M25. Operating speed is quoted as ‘up to 500km/h) using seven vehicle formations with a seating capacity of 840 passengers.
For more detail, www.500kmh.com is a fun web site.
While Newsnight on BBC2 ran a ‘personal view' piece by noted architectural critic Jonathan Meades extolling Ultraspeed, the national press, to my surprise, gave the launch very little space. But the promoters were pinning their hopes on political backing.
Transrapid and Ultraspeed UK succeeded in gaining an audience at 10 Downing Street with Tony Blair and his election strategist Alan Millburn. The subsequent spin was that Whitehall was very impressed by the presentation.
Indeed, the Prime Minister was expected to endorse the inclusion of magnetic levitation technology in the re-examination of the case for the north-south high speed line proposed, without much enthusiasm I have to say, by Transport Secretary Alistair Darling at the ‘Future of rail – making it happen' conference on 3 February. Cynical old curmudgeon that I am, I assumed that our PM would seek to exploit the high-tech halo-effect of maglev in the run up to the General Election, expected to be held on May 5.
After all, with the cost and performance of the railways likely to be a vote loser, what better for the Government than the prospect of a futuristic maglev high speed line taking country's transport system into the 21 st Century – soo New Labour, soo ‘forward not back'. And that seems to have been the impression No 10 gave after the presentation.
But a common assessment of the Prime Minister is that he is absolutely charming face to face, taking on board your concerns or proposals, so that you go away thinking that you have succeeded in getting your point across. Then he does what he intended to do all along.
So there we were, geared up for some high level ‘I have seen the future and it levitates' ringing endorsement from the PM. Reality was somewhat more prosaic.
In a letter to Jack Cunningham MP Mr Blair said, ‘We are ready to look at the potential of Maglev alongside more conventional high speed rail technologies in the work being taken forward'. Bathos or what?.
And no doubt the study will show what the Chinese already know, that, a transport system with nowhere to go at the end of the high speed guideway is nowhere near so valuable as a high speed railway line connected to the existing network. Just compare the benefits of Phase 1 of a high speed railway – say London-Birmingham, with a similar maglev.
After last month's suspension of the laws of physics it's time to suspend (magnetically) the laws of aerodynamics. According to the Ultraspeed website, ‘friction free' Transrapid will offer h alf the journey time of the UK's best trains (London-Leeds), twice the frequency, three times the capacity and around half the energy consumption.
Hmmm. The basic equation for the resistance to motion of a train is: Resistance = A+BV+CV 2 , where A, B and C are constants related to the vehicles and V the speed.
Now, having the full equation for the resistance of the Pre-Series Advanced Passenger Train conveniently to hand, as one does, I worked out the resistance to motion on level track at 200km/h and thus the power needed to maintain that speed. The answer, for a 12 trailer car plus two power car APT-P is 2.6MegaWatts, or around 3,230 hp, which empirically feels about right.
Fig 1 shows the proportion of the total power needed to overcome each category of resistance. Note that V squared is predominantly about aerodynamic drag,
Then I cranked the speed up to 500km/h. I also took out the power cars and shortened the formation to 10 cars to simulate a maglev vehicle. The power increased to 29.5MW, absorbed as in fig 2. Wheels or magnetic flux, what counts is aerodynamic drag.
Now energy is power multiplied by the time it is used, as in Watt Hours.
So, say 2hr 20min to Leeds and assume an average power of 2.6MW (I know this is crude, but don't worry), and we have 6 MWh.
Now lift off in the Transrapid with a Heathrow-Leeds journey time of 75 minutes. I make that 36.8MWh.
So, ‘half the energy consumption? Well, only if the decimal place in the wrong place. It certainly makes the Rotodyne revival look imminent.
