Why Maglev is (Basically) Impossible

This maglev test in China has just smashed a world record.

It shot this one-tonne sledge to a speed of 700-kph in just two seconds.

That’s just under the cruising speed of a commercial aircraft.

It’s early days, but it could make China a world leader in ultra fast ground transportation.

It’s so powerful, in fact, that the Chinese military may even use it to launch jets from aircraft carriers.

And it comes just a few years since this floated off the production line: the CRRC 600, China’s first domestically produced maglev train, capable of operating at 600-kph, just shy of the current record holder: Japan’s L0 Series maglev.

The race for the ultra fast transport revolution is on.

Or is it? Because, we’ve been here before… “A prototype of the maglev” Maglev Maglev Maglev system Maglev system The near future is on maglev It’s just as if there's a magnetic river flowing along there Have the wheels come off the maglev dream?

The L0 Series should have been flinging people between Tokyo and Nagoya since 2025… Instead it spends its days going back and forth on this short test track in the Japanese alps.

And whilst there are ambitions for this to go into service in five years time… for now, it’s just a prototype and hasn’t even attempted a high speed test.

So, it’s time to ask a big question, is maglev even possible - and if it is the wonder technology of the future, why does the future never arrive?

This is the Shanghai Maglev Train.

It’s the longest and fastest of the six maglevs in commercial operation around the world.

Still though, it’s a bit… underwhelming.

It takes you from Shanghai Airport to here… the outskirts of Shanghai, where most people then jump onto the metro to continue their journey into the city.

I say most people, but that’s still not very many people, because the metro also goes to the airport, so most people actually just… use that.

For those who do choose the brief maglev journey, it’s technically capable of reaching 431-kph. Pretty fast. But a few years ago it was capped at 300-kph…

reaching 431-kph. Pretty fast. But a few years ago it was capped at 300-kph… and the average speed is just 224-kph – which is slower than a high speed train.

Given there’s such a gulf between this and what’s in development elsewhere, you'd be forgiven for thinking it’s an early prototype, but you’d be wrong.

The first commercial maglev opened way back in 1984 in Britain’s Birmingham airport. Shuttling passengers along at a bracing 42-kph.

Over the next two decades, the technology was refined and a German system, known as Transrapid, became the go-to design. Welcome onboard the transrapid 08 enjoy your flight at ground level It’s built around a technology called electromagnetic suspension, or EMS, which uses the attractive power of magnets to achieve levitation.

The train’s undercarriage loops beneath a concrete guideway, both of which are installed with a set of opposing magnets, which lift the train up when an electric current is passed through.

The propulsion comes from a linear motor, with the train being pushed along by a second set of magnets laid down the centre of a guideway.

Because there’s no contact between the train and the track, there are a couple of huge advantages: firstly, there’s no moving parts so there’s no wear, which massively reduces the maintenance needed on both the guideway and the vehicle.

As well as there being no wear, there’s also no friction, meaning trains could, in theory, reach speeds unimaginable even on high speed trains.

Even if that wasn’t so apparent from the start… Of course, first you have to work out the most efficient track layout but that’s easy.

As long as you parameterise the alignment as a constrained 3D spline, minimise curvature and jerk under superelevation limits, solve the optimisation across the terrain manifold, and integrate the resulting geometry back into a buildable coordinate system. Obviously.

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Now, back to floating trains.

Despite its promise, the Shanghai Maglev Train failed to make much of an impression, despite how hard it tried.

Shanghai is also setting new standards in transportation, for it has something no-where else has yet: the transrapid super speed maglev system.

Ridership levels flatlined from the start. It was expensive, and it just didn’t go anywhere useful.

If you’re a bit of a train nerd like me, you might be feeling a bit let down by that. It’s

a long way from the revolutionary technology we were all promised. So, what went wrong?

If you want to build a maglev, always take a step back and ask what is the problem you're actually trying to solve.

This is Jon Shaw, he’s an expert in where people go and how they get there.

Because maglev, or any rail system, requires so much infrastructure built up front, any new line needs to be considered as part of a broader transport strategy If you're looking to make a strategic decision to link two big places together more quickly, then the reason you're doing that is to try and make them function as a single economic

space and that means that you unlock all sorts of investment opportunities, it makes it easier for people to move around the labour market, it make it easier to connect with each other, and what you do is instead of having one plus one equaling two for your economic space, you're now getting one plus three equals four equals five

We didn’t know we needed a faster horse, until someone gave us a faster horse Despite its limited success, in the years after the opening of the Shanghai maglev in 2003, interest in long distance Transrapid systems took off around the world.

Berlin to Hamburg, Shanghai to Hangzhou, Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, London to Glasgow...

These were all serious proposals that looked like they would herald the arrival of the long awaited maglev revolution… But then, they didn’t… So what happened?

Hidden among the benefits of maglev were a number of fundamental problems. EMS, the system Transrapid relies on to float, provides very little in terms of levitation.

The shanghai maglev floats between eight and 12-millimetres above the guideway.

Maintaining such fine tolerances over long distances poses a massive construction challenge that inevitably leads to other issues.

The attractive force that EMS is built around is inherently unstable.

As a train travels along the guideway, the gap between the sets of magnets is constantly disrupted. This could be caused by anything from small deviations in the track,

constantly disrupted. This could be caused by anything from small deviations in the track, fluctuations in the electromagnetic field or even a strong wind.

If the distance increases, the magnetic force quickly weakens, levitation fails and the train drops.

Likewise, if the distance decreases, the magnetic force becomes increasingly powerful and the train is pulled onto the guideway.

In other words, there’s no force trying to maintain an equilibrium.

At best, this causes a bumpy ride for passengers, at worst it could undermine the structure and safety of the whole system.

To counter this, Transrapid trains are equipped with an active control system. This measures

the distance between the guideway and the train thousands of times a second and makes constant adjustments in the strength of the magnetic force to try and maintain a consistent distance.

But that’s easier said than done. And the faster the train goes, the worse the problem gets.

So far, It’s not as steady as the last bullet train I went on.

As anyone who’s travelled on the Shanghai maglev will tell you, it’s anything but a smooth ride.

It’s partly because the experience was so bumpy that in 2021 the speed was limited to 300-kph.

Work is being done to fix the issue. A 2026 paper published in the Journal of Railway Science and Technology provided an overview of the progress scientists have made in addressing excessive vibration, but there’s a long way to go.

That leaves a big question mark over China’s CRRC 600. It uses a homemade variation of the Transrapid system, but how it will cope with the issue of excessive vibration is unknown.

Since its unveiling, it’s only had access to a 1.5-kilometre test track at the University of Tongji, so it hasn’t been tested at sustained high speeds.

But there’s an even more fundamental problem maglev faces, which is not one shared by its rival, high speed rail.

An advantage of high-speed rail is its proven technology, it's really good, it moves a lot of people really, really quickly and once you get to where the high- speed rail runs out, then the train can just go back onto a classic railway line and you can extend the journey so you’ve got that kind of compatibility with the existing network.

In the 2010s, just as maglev proposals began to make headway, high speed rail offered a trade off. Lower speed but greater integration. Maglev just couldn’t compete.

Between 2010 and 2024, over 50,000-kilometres of high speed rail lines were built around the world.

Meanwhile, the only maglevs that were constructed were airport shuttles or short metro lines.

As cool as maglev was, when put next to a proven technology, high speed rail won out every time.

This exciting, futuristic mode of transport met its end in a suburb just outside of Shanghai.

Or did it?

Japan, apparently, didn’t get the memo. While elsewhere, maglev projects fell by the wayside, the Central Japan Railway Company was hard at work on this: the Chūō Shinkansen.

Work began in 2014 and it's currently the only long distance maglev line under construction anywhere on this planet.

When complete, it will connect Tokyo with Nagoya and Osaka, making the whole 438-kilometre trip in just 67-minutes That same journey on the legendary bullet train takes two and a half hours.

So, what’s going on?

Well, Japan sidestepped the biggest issues Transrapid poses by developing a completely different system: SCMaglev.

Where EMS uses the attractive power of magnets to provide lift, the SCMaglev uses the opposite, repelling force to hover much higher above the guideway and with no undercarriage looping underneath.

The guideway is lined with vertically aligned magnetic coils. As the train passes over, these interact with magnets on the train in the opposite configuration, producing lift.

Unlike EMS which is inherently unstable, this system passively keeps the train centred.

If a carriage moves too close to one side of the guideway, the increasing magnetic force pushes it back to a point where the magnet on the other side creates balance.

Either side of each carriage is a set of four magnetic coils. Using

a liquid helium cooling system, these are chilled to –269°C.

At this temperature, the magnetic field can flow without resistance, further increasing the efficiency of the system.

But beyond technical matters, there are other reasons Japan is forging ahead with maglev.

Japan's a really interesting case because they've got obviously a very, very, mature high-speed railway network already. And they've come to the policy position whereby between Tokyo and Osaka, for example, their high-speed lines are full we could build another high-speed line, but we don't actually get any benefit from that other than the congestion relief in terms of speed.

So if they've got the technology ready to be able to deploy between Tokyo and Osaka, to A, relieve the congestion on the high- speed line, which then becomes the classic line, and B to do it to get to make sure that that journey is much more quick between the two places, they can enhance connectivity even more between those two places and get the economic benefits there from and also they can develop their technology base

and then that becomes ready to export to other people if other countries want to buy it etc. But, for it to achieve that economic payoff, or to make sense as an export product, the numbers have to add up… and that’s far from guaranteed.

One of the advantages of maglev is the decreased need for maintenance reduces the overall operating bill.

But the energy they use to run is colossal. The SCMaglev takes four times the energy to run just twice the speed of a normal train.

Maglevs also need more specialist infrastructure than just their unique guideways.

One side effect of the incredible speed of maglevs is a phenomenon known as tunnel boom.

When a train enters a tunnel, it forces air through the tunnel like a piston. At high speeds, it comes out of the other end in a shockwave.

a piston. At high speeds, it comes out of the other end in a shockwave.

Chinese engineers have developed a system to mitigate this. A 100 metre porous sound absorbing buffer diffuses the shock wave, similar to a silencer on a pistol.

Neither of these are insurmountable hurdles, but they do raise the price on a system that won’t have as much capacity as a high-speed train.

The L0 Series maglev carriages are significantly smaller than their bullet train equivalents carrying 42 fewer people per car.

They also won’t be able to run as frequently. The switches that allow maglev trains to change track are much slower than rail trains, meaning the trains must run at least every 10 minutes, as opposed to every three minutes for the bullet train.

In other words, the cost of construction and operation continue to go up, as the return gets squeezed.

The technology behind the SCMaglev has been decades in the making.

Testing on the vehicle began long before the Chūō Shinkansen route was announced.

Construction on the line is massively behind schedule. Passengers won’t be travelling until 2035 at the earliest, a decade after was first announced.

A significant cause of that delay, however, isn't the tech itself, but the extensive tunnels that need to be built.

We tend to think about transport in purely technical terms. A bit like driverless cars, where the biggest question around their widespread use is whether the AI is able to cope with everything that can happen on a road.

In that sense, ultra fast maglev is possible. It can be done.

But the question is less about the technical feat and whether or not we can deploy that technology at any meaningfu scale.

Over the past twenty years, China has transformed its geography with high-speed rail, and its ability to build should never be underestimated.

But while the progress it’s been making with maglev is impressive, there’s still a long way to go before anything can be rolled out at scale.

For now Japan’s SCMaglev kind of looks like it could become the first commercially operating maglev line. The big question is whether that then becomes the engine of an economy or just another piece of showpiece tech.

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