this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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I don't know much about various train technologies, but surely that's going to cause massive wear and tear on the tracks and need to be serviced very often right? And any debris on the track is probably going to cause quite bad damage to the wheels too.
I don't know, but I feel like your "if built to spec" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, what kind of spec? Is that sort of quality realistic for a real-world installation? Exposed to the elements?
Maglev is definitely more expensive to build and probably to run, but it seems like it'd be far more reliable? And also a much smoother experience for those on-board?
And I feel like Maglev has much greater theoretical speed limits than typical contact tracks, as, well, we basically remove the friction between the wheel and the track?
Also imo Maglev is cool and gets style points.
In the end the maintenance cost for maglev vs bullet trains are about the same. Bullet trains focus more on mechanical maintenance of the track and wheels. While the maintenance of maglev is typically more technical, it requires constant recalibration of the electronics and constant monitoring for alignment.
Traditional steel on rail is actually more reliable in practice. Theoretically the basic mechanics of maglev are more reliable, but in practice they tend to suffer from longer delays when they do fail. This is mostly because the repairs/maintenance for traditional rail can be done by just about anyone, where maglevs tend to be locked in by a single vendor contract.
They are theoretically faster, but in practice the speed of trains are most often governed not by the limitations of the trains themselves, but instead are limited by the surrounding infrastructure and terrain.
The cruising speed of railed bullet trains are around 200mph, while the cruising speeds of maglev is around 265mph. Maglevs have gone significantly faster around 375mph, but thats not really a realistic expectation for daily operations.
Imo both are extremely cool, but traditional rail is just a lot more practical for a plethora of reasons. The most important being that the installation and operational cost are just a lot more realistic than maglev. There's a reason there's only a total of 37 miles of maglev in operation today compared to over 30k miles of high-speed rail.
Remember that the TGV has the high speed record for rail, at 574kmh or 356mph
Yeah, but it's not something you would ever see in operation. The V150 trial had special modified and powered cars running on the most favorable railway conditions possible. Plus, running over 200mph on steel starts to create enough friction to damage the wheels and rail.
Most industry nations around the world are running high speed trains by now. They're doing petty fine I'd say. China threw a ton of money into German maglev tech and there isn't really much to see still. There's a reason most countries gave up on it.
Zehn Minuten!!
More like zehn minuten später
Ich wünsche mir die Zeit zurück, in der ich über Politiker fast ausschließlich lachen musste, statt mich endlos über sie aufzuregen.
Nicht, dass es da nicht auch genug Gründe gegeben hätte, aber zwischendrin kam immer mal wieder etwas raus was nicht komplett gestört war.
I reckon it'll be one of those things that was just ahead of it's time, I think the concept is sound, but other infrastructure to run it, energy, rare-earth mining, just isn't ready to keep up yet.
Yeah, and dont forget the scale.
Japan is building a maglev line right now. But they have >60 years of experience with high speed rail and the whole concept is established. Even then its "only" about to be 400km to connect three major metropolian areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen Still:
Chicago to New York are more like 1200km and major stops between them are like Cleveland and Toledo. Uuuh... just build regular ass rail with a bit higher specs for higher speeds...
We've spent over half that on the Iran war so far.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/us/politics/iran-war-cost-pentagon.html
The main issue is that you need absurd amounts of resources just to build the track alone.
? ICE 3 trains are already running 300 km/h in Germany and 320 in France. Nothing "ahead of its time"
I'm saying Maglev is ahead of it's time.
Built to spec does do a lot of heavy lifting. American distances are larger than European distances. China has the advantage of a dictatorship which can be decisive.
But the Interstate system was expensive and had a crazy spec and was built and continues to be maintained at an extremely high cost.
Last I heard, maglev is mostly vaporware. Just build good tracks.
Not to worry! The USA is catching up real quick on that point
tbf idk on which behalf you argue about american distances. But i feel(!)¹ like thats another reason to prefer regular ass trains(with implied heavy lifting specs). Like it is known that you can build >tenthousand miles of regular high speed tracks to build a tight network between major cities. It has been done. America doesnt even have the huge issue of several differing national standards which are in competition to eachother but still want to be connected ideally like in europe.
¹am just random idiot on the internet.
ahem excuse me.
ooof, i'm so sorry
😉
Track maintenance is expensive and even more so when in remote areas. Population density is much lower in USA than most of Europe so km rail per person is just much higher.
Hasn’t stopped the interstate system from taking billions of dollars a year though.
Building a strong high speed rail in dense areas like New England and Midwest probably would be a good starter because people can see how well it works. But there’s so much carbrain inertia.
Japan and afaik also china are building long distance maglev lines at the moment. We will see if there are any issues that regular hsr wouldn't have. It's certainly expensive to build, but high speed connection between major cities can be worth it. Technology that can go at almost 2/3 the speed of planes but is able to run entirely on electricity isn't necessarily just some gimmick, there is an actual use case for it. 300 km/h is fast, but 500 is a lot faster. Of course just like with existing HSR, building routes that support these high speeds is a challenge (and part of why japans line under construction is so much faster than the existing shinkansen is that it just cuts straight through the mountains, which is of course expensive).
The planned line is supposedt to be even faster than flying (45m vs 1h) overall, probably due to the overhead of taxiing. And that's without considering security.
There’s only 6 globally, under 100km total track. Shinkansen trains are conventional rail. It’s been just around the corner for 100 years.
“It seems like this experimental tech is going to be more reliable than the proven thing that’s existed since the 19th century.”
You sure about that, hoss?
Pretty sure there's been more than a couple times in history when new technology has replaced old technology...