🇩🇪 The broken dream of the transrapid in Germany

Germany built the famous transrapid back in the day. They even ran this testing facility. The plan was to connect Germany with this high speed monorail and export this Made in Germany technology into the world. It never really happened.

[thedave]

The one in Shanghai does not go to the city center it goes to the outskirts of the city.
I made that mistake thinking I would find a hotel to stay the night I was in the middle of nowhere and my cards decided not to work there was no cash machine and one hotel which scowled at me and told me they had no space. Awesome train glad I rode it but it's a train to nowhere.

[TheHoveHeretic]

Point of Order: Wuppertahl's *schwebebahn* is a functioning (suspended) monorail.

Could there be a future for MAGLEV monorail? Any where with experience of more than one rail gauge will tell you how much transshipment costs (even if it's merely gauge changing wheelsets).

Passenger only (and just possibly aviation style LD containers) looks a better bet, but with conventional HS rail capable of 250km/h, monorail needs to come with some serious advantages to make duplication of fundamental infrastructure a worthwhile investment.

[aoeuable]

Way too expensive per kilometre of track, not *that* much faster than ordinary HSR especially considering that above a certain speed noise due to air resistance predominates, and last but not least it's incompatible with ordinary rail -- a HSR train can share a track and train stations with slower regional trains, that doesn't work with the transrapid.

The company which developed the tracks for the transrapid back then now developed a system of their own, the TSB, with dirt cheap tracks, in many circumstances cheaper than ordinary rail, but it's limited to a maximum of about 200km/h, they're advertising it as a regional train thing. TSB viaducts especially are cheap because they can be built light because a maglev train distributes its weight evenly, there's no point loads, cheap viaducts means no level crossings, you can go over fields without annoying farmers (too much), they can also climb quite steep inclines. Only levitation and propulsion are magnetic, electricity pickup uses direct contact. A dense network of those things is definitely more useful than a couple of high-speed corridors.