By Ron Gluckman/Beijing,China
FEW EVENTS OF THE LAST HALF CENTURY
Like many on the mainland, I was on the move over the Chinese New Year. My
flight lifted off early on the last morning of the Year of the Horse, touching
down at the airport eight minutes later. Yet it never left the ground.
My flight - that's what it was called - was aboard Shanghai's spanking-new
Maglev (magnetic levitation) train, the world's fastest, most futuristic
passenger line. Long-awaited, too, since it's been seven decades since the
invention of the process that was finally put to a test at the end of last year,
when Premier Zhu Rongji took a ride with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of
Germany, which helped fund and build this line. Now, common cadres were having a
turn.
Local media called them "joyrides," these series of trial runs to the
international airport in Pudong, across the river from Shanghai proper, that add
a bit of flash to the Spring Festival. They certainly live up to the billing.
Smiles abound inside the sleek train as, with a breathtaking whoosh, it rockets
to 300 kilometers per hour in two minutes flat. Overhead, like a giant
scoreboard, an LED blinks out our record-breaking progress till we top 430 kph.
"It's wonderful," says Lu Cong Mei, who came with her husband, sister
and several other relatives. Lu plops into a window seat with her shopping bag
of thermal underwear from Three Gun (motto: "Cozy and Elastic) and
gleefully watches scenery flash past like in a Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon.
"Amazing," she comments afterwards. "I'll tell all my friends to
try it." Grandson Dai Wei, 14, adds: "It is fast, really fast. Way
faster than I expected. It felt like flying."
Indeed, the Maglev is faster than any speeding locomotive precisely because it's
as much like a plane as any railroad we've known. True, the train has no wings,
but no wheels or engine, either. Transrapid, the German firm that developed the
system, describes the Maglev as "the first fundamental innovation in the
field of railway technology since the invention of the railway."
Magnets are the attraction. First, powerful magnets lift the entire train about
10 millimeters above the special track, called a guideway, since it mainly
directs the passage of the train. Other magnets provide propulsion, and braking,
and the speeds - up to 500 kph in test runs; a good 60 percent faster than the
renowned Bullet Trains - are attained largely due to the reduction of friction.
Is there a need for such speed? Certainly not on such a short sprint, barely 30
kilometers from the subway in Pudong to the airport. And not at the cost, note
critics. The Pudong line, which should go into operation by the end of this
year, is unlikely to ever recoup its $1.2 billion investment. A high-speed link
between Beijing and Shanghai, among several additional Chinese lines under
consideration, might cost $22-30 billion, or nearly as much as China intends to
invest in all rail infrastructure nationwide in its current five-year plan.
Still, critics miss the point. And the thrill. The Maglev isn't about getting
from point A to B in Pudong. Rather, it's the ride, a glorious glide, from the
past to the future. And where this new train might take us, not simply San
Francisco to Los Angeles, say, in less than two hours, but in a flash, from now
to Tomorrowland.
That's the rush I feel stepping aboard the sleekly-contoured train, futuristic
fervor mixed with nostalgia for all those comics and sci-fi novels from boyhood.
There is good reason, since the Maglev's technology is actually rather dated.
German inventors patented the basic system way back before World War II.
That's another point of critics. In the ensuing seven decades, magnetic
levitation trains haven't moved much closer to reality. A test track in northern
German was built nearly 20 years ago, but even the Germans have shied away from
launching a commercial magnetic levitation line because of the cost.
"The huge investment just doesn't make sense in a country like Germany,
with a well-developed rail system," concedes Dr. Wolfgang Rohr, German
Consul General in Shanghai. "But for countries like China - or the United
States or Australia - they could jump to this new technology which has huge
potential."
He points out that the Maglev is pollution-free, with no exhaust. Later, I join
a group of excited old-timers in the countryside, midway to the airport. We
watch the Maglev blaze silently past. That's another advantage; hardly any
noise.
"In Germany, we've been having endless discussions about this," notes
Eckhard Schneider, a German tourist riding the Shanghai Maglev over the
holidays. "Here, in China, they just do it!" Adds companion Ulli
Schonart: "They built this all in less than two years. Amazing! In two
years in Germany, we'd just have a plan for the evacuation of the birds along
the way."
Long hopelessly ahead-of-its time, the Maglev could finally come a time. Germany
may soon commit to its own line, possibly from Dortmund to Düsseldorf in time
for the 2006 World Cup, or a Munich airport express. Meanwhile, in the United
States, a $1 billion-funded US pilot project has settled on two finalists: a
47-mile Pittsburgh system and a 40-mile track linking Baltimore and Washington,
DC. California Maglev-backers are lobbying congress to fund a 92-mile circuit
between three area airports that could be expanded to a 273-mile web designed to
relieve the region's gridlock. The US proposals would all utilize
independently-patented American Maglev technology.
All that is a big if, though. For now, Shanghai is the first out of the tracks,
and early-riders give the train-plane two thumbs-up . "I'm proud that
Shanghai has this when nowhere else in the world does," says Lu, as we
glide almost soundlessly to our arrival at the new Pudong international airport.
On a journey of firsts, here's another. Lu has never seen the airport. Which
isn't that surprising, considering she, like the others in her family, and most
in China, for that matter, have never taken a flight. Until now.
Ron Gluckman is an American reporter who has been roaming around Asia since 1991, when he was based in Hong Kong. Since 2000, he has been based in Beijing, covering China for a wide variety of publications including the Asian Wall Street Journal, which ran this in the Weekend Edition June 7-9, 2002.
Check back for a larger, more thorough investigation of China's space program, for science publication Seed Magazine, on the stands in September 2002.
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