• BL4CKP1XX13@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    12 days ago

    I don’t know much about various train technologies, but surely that’s going to cause massive wear and tear on the tracks and need to be serviced very often right? And any debris on the track is probably going to cause quite bad damage to the wheels too.

    I don’t know, but I feel like your “if built to spec” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, what kind of spec? Is that sort of quality realistic for a real-world installation? Exposed to the elements?

    Maglev is definitely more expensive to build and probably to run, but it seems like it’d be far more reliable? And also a much smoother experience for those on-board?

    And I feel like Maglev has much greater theoretical speed limits than typical contact tracks, as, well, we basically remove the friction between the wheel and the track?

    Also imo Maglev is cool and gets style points.

    • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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      12 days ago

      Built to spec does do a lot of heavy lifting. American distances are larger than European distances. China has the advantage of a dictatorship which can be decisive.

      But the Interstate system was expensive and had a crazy spec and was built and continues to be maintained at an extremely high cost.

      Last I heard, maglev is mostly vaporware. Just build good tracks.

      • blx@piefed.zip
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        12 days ago

        China has the advantage of a dictatorship which can be decisive

        Not to worry! The USA is catching up real quick on that point

    • SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
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      12 days ago

      Most industry nations around the world are running high speed trains by now. They’re doing petty fine I’d say. China threw a ton of money into German maglev tech and there isn’t really much to see still. There’s a reason most countries gave up on it.