Finish for trains and start for maglevs?

The French “train a grand vitesse” (TGV) attained a record speed for a train on wheels of 568 km/hr on 31 March 2007. The history of technology shows that when a new technology like the steamship appears, the old one makes a final spurt to beat it. Recall the magnificent China clippers of the 1890s, the fastest sailing vessels ever. The Japanese Maglev has already reached 581 km/hr, and as usual the new technology has the future in front with a lot of potential to exploit. Naturally, maglevs must fight to emerge. Help sometimes comes from unexpected places. Sailing ships had trouble getting through the Suez canal and thus lost a crucial market. What might be the Suez canal for Maglevs? According to the logic of our papers mentioned below, TGVs could yet retain a useful niche and heavy traffic as commuter trains on routes they can complete in about 20 minutes (say, 150 km distance), allowing an inclusive round-trip journey of 1 hour.

The Evolution of Transport Jesse H. Ausubel and Cesare Marchetti The Industrial Physicist 7(2):20-24, April/May 2001.

Toward Green Mobility: The Evolution of Transport Jesse H. Ausubel, Cesare Marchetti, and Perrin S. Meyer European Review 6(2):143-162, 1998. We envision a transport system producing zero emissions and sparing the surface landscape, while people on average range hundreds of kilometers daily. We believe this prospect of “green mobility” is consistent in general principles with historical evolution. We lay out these general principles, extracted from widespread observations of human behavior over long periods, and use them to explain past transport and to project the next 50 to 100 years. Our picture emphasizes the slow penetration of new technologies of transport adding speed in the course of substituting for the old ones in terms of time allocation. We discuss serially and in increasing detail railroads, cars, airplanes, and magnetically levitated trains (maglevs).