- NEW DELHI - Radical ideas
appear to be grabbing the attention of engineers and techno-experts who
are devoting their time and energy to changing the face of passenger rail
travel. If these ideas take shape, a day return trip from Bristol to Boston
aboard the supersonic "Super Maglev'' - the train in pipes - may become
a reality by 2050.
-
- Imagine supersonic trains cruising at speeds seven times
that of the speed of sound and a network of tube-trains criss-crossing
the entire globe. Already, high speed trains such as Eurostar, TGVs, Super
Voyagers, Pendolino and Maglev have become a reality and a new world record
of 552 km per hour has been achieved.
-
- Now picture this arrangement for an Atlantic Tube where
the tube infrastructure is constructed of concrete and built on land, then
taken by ship to where it is needed. Dedicated tubes for each direction
would be assembled at some 50 metres below seal level and tethered to the
seabed or to surface floats.
-
- Combined with land tubes, a global system running to
several thousand kilometres is envisaged. To ensure absolutely no physical
contact between train and tube, the system would be fitted with computers
that permanently measure clearances and then adjust the train's trajectory
by fractions of a millimetre to reflect any change in the position of the
tube.
-
- A further practical consideration relates to the amount
of acceleration or deceleration people can comfortably bear. The proposal
plans for uniform acceleration for the first six minutes of the route and
a period of nearly 15 minutes for deceleration to the terminus. The remainder
of the journey would be at a cruising speed of 3,700 km per hour, making
a trip from the U.K. to the west coast of the U.S. in less than two hours.
-
- This scenario was conjured up by Tony Roche, an engineer
who has spent four decades with UK Rail, in this year's George Stephenson
lecture held recently in the Capital. He pointed out that the principal
constraint on how fast a magnetic levitation train can go, apart from power
supply, is associated with friction between the train and the air around
it, since air resistance rises exponentially with speed. By enclosing the
train in a tube from which the air has been evacuated, a system can be
created without aerodynamic resistance and in these circumstances the power
requirements are directly proportional to speed.
-
- Using these two engineering concepts of a vacuum tube
and super-conductivity, groups of engineers in Japan and the U.S. are looking
into the concept of a global network of tubes in which trains would travel
at seven times the speed of sound and provide stiff competition to air
travel.
-
- Mr. Roche said it was an article by Jules Verne in the
Strand magazine in 1895 that captured the imagination of an American entrepreneur,
Frank Davidson, who with his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and others in Japan, created the vision of the global tube
train system.
-
-
- Copyright © 2002 The Hindu. All rights reserved.
Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly
prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu.
-
- http://mtf.in.yahoo.com/mailto?url
|
