A Trans-Global Maglev Train System?

January 22, 2009

What if there was a way to start the morning with a bagel and cream cheese in New York and make it to London in time for a mid-day sarnie, and then on to Tokyo for a sushi dinner, and then back to New York for a cup of decaf espresso and dessert? And without taking one of those suborbital space express services, a development  that futurists have been predicting is just around the corner for the past decade or so, or resorting to something as utterly, extremely outlandish as teleportation.

No, I’m talking about a mode of transportation that’s only moderately outlandish. What if we built a worldwide system of magnetic levitation trains, propelled by powerful magnets, which would travel at speeds of thousands of miles an hour through gigantic vacuum tubes tethered to the ocean floor and laid across (or buried underneath) the countryside? Keep reading...

Trans-global maglev train service would have some enormous benefits, and not just for dilettantes intrigued with the novelty of sampling the cuisine in several different countries thousands of miles apart on the same day.

People could work on one continent and live on another, which could open up all sorts of new opportunities for people in virtually every profession or trade. It would be possible to transport manufactured products, raw materials and food far more quickly than the conventional combination of cargo ships and trucks or diesel freight trains could, at a cost much lower than air freight.  And if the maglev system was powered with electricity from non-carbon sources—such as wind, solar, geothermal or nuclear plants—it might actually help us to reduce the rate of human-caused climate change without crippling the international economy. 

That’s why an intra-planetary subway be a good idea. Here’s why it also might be a very bad idea. Building a relatively simple above-ground maglev line with today’s technology, by the most optimistic U.S. government estimates, costs about $10 million per mile, so laying thousands of miles of giant tubes across the Atlantic would be fantastically costly.

Enabling large numbers of people to flit from continent to continent could turn epidemics into pandemics overnight. Making it possible to ship goods cheaply from distant countries might also make it more difficult for U.S. manufacturers to compete with low-wage workers overseas. And an undersea train infrastructure would be an almost unbelievably inviting target for terrorists.

That said, I really like the idea of being able to take a train around the world. When I was an impressionable kid back in the 1960s, one of my favorite comic books was the Classics Illustrated version of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in 80 Days. Here’s the cover art, which shows Indians on horseback ambushing intrepid protagonist Phineas Fogg’s train as he tries to make his way across the Old West and back to London in time to collect a wager from his drinking pals. Thanks to the wonder of Google, I now know that the Verne’s fictional hero apparently was inspired by a eccentric real-life adventurer with the oddly appropriate name of George Francis Train, who in 1870 actually circled the globe in 80 days.

In fact, by 1892, Train did even better, managing to make it home and back in just 60 days via a combination of steamship and rail travel. (BTW, Train is a fascinating historical figure. He was instrumental in acquiring land for the Union Pacific Railroad, espoused vegetarianism and women’s suffrage, and in his later years publicly offered himself as a candidate for the post of U.S. Dictator, which existed only in his imagination. But as usual, I digress.)

A couple of years before Train took his last globetrotting trip, an explorer, military officer, politician and sometime land speculator named William Gilpin  wrote a book, Cosmopolitan Railway: Compacting and Fusing Together All the World's Continents, in which he espoused a trans-global railway as an innovation that would transform humankind:

The truth is that this world’s highway will so bring together and intermingle all the peoples of the Earth as ultimately in a great measure to obliterate race distinctions and bring about a universal brotherhood of man. It will tend to discourage war, and those systems of wrong and injustice which the most Christian nations have indulged in from the beginning. It will be to modern exclusiveness what the crusades were to human ignorance and human wrongs during the dark ages.

Okay, so that may have been overstating the case a bit. But Gilpin’s concept still resonates. The central part of his proposal--creation of a rail link across the 53-mile-wide Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska—has long intrigued the Russian government.

In 2007, they proposed building a $12 billion undersea train tunnel under the strait, as part of a new $65 billion, 3,700-mile rail system capable of carrying 100 million tons of freight traffic from East to West and vice-versa each year. (Here’s a Bloomberg News article about the project.) The Russians also would include pipelines and power lines to enable them to sell oil, natural gas and electricity to North America.

The Bering Strait tunnel would be about twice as long as the “Chunnel”,  the underwater passageway completed in 1993 to connect the UK with the European continent. But it wouldn’t be the most ambitious feat required for a trans-global train system. That would be the Trans-Atlantic tunnel, an undertaking so mind-boggling that it seems like something Jules Verne might have dreamed up. But maybe not. Ernst Frankel, a retired engineering professor from Massachusetts Institution of Technology, and Frank Davidson, a former MIT researcher and co-founder of the Channel Tunnel Study Group, have devised an ingenious plan for such a structure that Frankel says is feasible from an engineering standpoint.  As a 2004 article from Popular Mechanics describes it:

….sections of neutrally buoyant tunnel submerged 150 to 300 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic, then anchored to the seafloor–thereby avoiding the high pressures of the deep ocean. Then air would be pumped out, creating a vacuum, and alternating magnetic pulses would propel a magnetically levitated train capable of speeds up to 4,000 mph across the pond in an hour.

Here’s a graphic presentation that visually explains the concept, courtesy of the Discovery Channel’s Extreme Engineering  program.

Frankel and Davidson estimate that the Atlantic Ocean tunnel could be built for somewhere between $78 billion and $155 billion. That price tag, though hefty, no longer seems quite as daunting in an era in which the U.S. government is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into banks that made bad investments during the real estate boom.

But over the long term, a global system of maglev trains would be vastly more environmentally friendly than our present carbon-based ground, water and air transportation, especially if we power it with electricity generated from non-carbon-based sources. The undersea portion, for example, conceivably might be powered by ocean wave energy, an untapped source with tremendous potential. Once the construction costs are covered, trans-global maglev might also turn out to be a whole lot cheaper than any other mode of transporting people and products, since Maglev trains moving through a vacuum would be vastly more energy efficient.

So what do you think? Should we build a worldwide maglev network, or is circling the globe in a train just too crazy of an idea? Express your opinion below.

Comments

[Mooey]

You could get to really faraway places fast. It sounds great to me.

[John]

Would there be problems with magnetic fields affecting sea life--particularly whales and dolphins--and their migration patterns?

[Neo-Luddite (I still use Windows 2000!)]

I found a book in Google Books that talks about the magnetic field issue

http://books.google.com/books?id=kBPSmCMv5QUC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=effect+of+magnetic+fields+on+aquatic+life&source=web&ots=-8CLU2U-4v&sig=c1Wrg9WCMbMrNeJCtg802okw49I&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result

It seems to me like there should be more research on this before anything is built.

[Rob M.]

With the government throwing billions of dollars at man made problems, the cost of funding a study that would benefit all mankind would be insignificant. This is certainly something that would be worth a feasibility study.

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

I agree. This strikes me as a really promising idea, and the price tag isn't anywhere near as high as I would have expected it to be. And imagine the potential economic stimulus effect worldwide from such a project. I'm hoping that it would promote better relations among the U.S., Russia and Europe, among others, since we'd need international cooperation to build the train system and everyone would benefit.

[Astroboy!]

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE TRAINS WRECK UNDER THE OCEAN?

[Casey Jones]

I wonder whether it would be safe for humans to travel at 4,000 miles per hour?

[Simon]

I think its a pretty cool idea. I like it except for the whole terrorist deal. We would need to be very cautious about that.

[bob]

one word earthquakes ???

[Patrick Kiger]

The tube would float tethered to the ocean floor, so theoretically at least, it would have enough 'give' to be able to withstand an undersea quake.

[Manny]

What sort of sound would an undersea maglev train generate? Aural pollution in the oceans already is a big problem for whales and dolphins. This seems to me like an idea that would need extensive testing to ensure that it doesn't cause an ecological disaster.

[Obamamania]

Obama's stimulus package includes $30 billion for rail and mass transit projects...
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2009/01/governor-mike-d.html

[Kevin]

It would also open up an easier way for invading armies to move around the world or for despots to escape or the like the Chinese guy we had in NZ who killed his wife, stufffed her in the boot of the car parked outside on the street in front of their house, took his daughter on a plane trip from Auckland to Melbourne, left her in the terminal building and then fled to Los Angeles and went on the run to eventually being discovered. Life was a real life journey back in the days of the sailing ships with journeys taking months...what would life be like if one travelled like in Maglev.

Would it enhance the slave trade that exists around the world and the trafficing of people and minorities groups

I have travelled part way around the world by train from Hong Kong to St Petersburg and love the experience of being in once in a life time locations and the people and expereinces, smells and different cultures. If I travelled it in high speed I would miss out in so much. Often I think it is the journey and not the destination often that matters.

[Patrick Kiger]

You raise some interesting points. btw, I remember reading in Robert Hughes' book "The Shock of the New" that when the steam-powered train was invented in the 19th century,train travel helped alter people's perceptions of time and space, because they could watch the landscape rush by quickly instead of having it change very slowly as they walked or rode on horseback. That accentuated view of reality was one of the influences that led to the development of Modern Art. Hyper-speed travel would change our perspective even more radically, I suspect.

[DR. C]

I like the idea.

But I think we should build the sea tunnel between Russia and the US. To see what ecological and economic affects appear.

The sea tunnel would be have no air so it should have little are no sound in it. Also the mag train does not connect with the guide rail so no vibrations.

[Adiguzel]

Uhm, why don't we try actually proofing this 70 year old technology by building the damned things where we really need them--like the New York/Boston/Philly/DC corridor, or the LA/San Francisco/Las Vegas triangle, or even the Dallas/Houston/San Antonio triangle or Raleigh/Durham to Atlanta?! As we all know, to improve technologies and/or reduce their costs, you have to actually build, maintain, fix and redesign them. The 6 years under the Shanghai maglev's belt should result in the Tokyo maglev being simpler and cheaper to build, yet slightly more sophisticated, and, slightly less expensive per mile. It would also be smarter for firms around the globe to share technologies, if for no other reason than to speed up both proliferation and cost effectiveness/profitability.

[DonCordier]

Hmmm...??? Another "AmTrak", eh!

Seriously, I suggest that the environmental impact (considering the direct environmental operating "costs" and NOT even considering the "environmental" costs to construct) would be shocking.

Also, regarding the "dollar" cost, when analyzing "guestimates" to build in current dollars, all should adjust the figures to a standard reference point or "constant dollar point" (i.e, 1970, 1980, 1990 or 2000 dollars).

In my opinion, the United States (and the world for that matter) are in for an escalation in the rate of inflation that has not been seen in the US but will likely resemble rates experienced in Argentina in the recent past or other select examples at various times since the late 1800s.

Alternatively, I do envision some specific applications of these concepts, however, not traveling at speeds equivalent to the supersonic movement of humans through relatively narrow, confined area.

Don Cordier

[yo shi]

thanks for the information and I think thats a great idea it just we need someone to stand out and be the leader of this plan