The world’s fastest train doesn’t run on rails at all. It doesn’t touch the ground. The Maglev, short for magnetic levitation, uses the pull of magnets to lift itself into the air and push itself forward. Lift removes friction, which means less wear, less maintenance, and speeds that top 600 kilometers per hour.
Japan has been testing its magnetic levitation system for decades, with a test track where the train whips by close to 600 kilometers an hour. Regular Maglev lines already operate in China, Japan, and South Korea, and more are in development. The principle is simple. Everyone has played with magnets.
Put a north pole and a south pole together, and they attract. Flip one around, and the same poles push each other apart. The Maglev uses electromagnets to do exactly that on a massive scale. In some systems, one technology handles both lifting and propelling.
In others, superconducting magnets create a field that interacts with loops set into the guideway walls. Those loops generate currents that push and pull the train to its levitation position. The only friction left is air, which makes the ride smooth at any speed. Hover trains tried something similar, but instead of magnets, they used a cushion of air, the same principle that powers hovercraft.
Britain’s Research Test Vehicle 31 was built in the 1970s, combining that air cushion with a linear induction motor invented by Eric Laithwaite. This motor eliminated the need for physical contact with the track. The train hit 167 kilometers per hour on a short test track in 1973, but the project was canceled in favor of a conventional high-speed train. France’s rival, the Aerotrain, suffered the same fate.
It was mothballed when the government chose the TGV instead. Early trains were driven by diesel engines, but even diesel locomotives are really electric. The diesel engine powers a generator, which powers the electric motors that turn the wheels. Running the diesel at a fixed speed gives the best efficiency.
The most powerful of these, the AC6000CW, generates 6,000 horsepower. They are the workhorses that haul the massive freight loads across continents. But diesel has drawbacks: the cost of fuel, regular maintenance, and the noise and smell. Many operators chose instead to plug their trains directly into the national electricity supply.
The first electric train was demonstrated in Berlin in the late 19th century, and it reached a top speed of 13 kilometers an hour. The technology has advanced enormously since then. The Shinkansen in Japan, the TGV in France, and the Eurostar linking Britain to the continent all draw their power directly from overhead wires or a live rail. The Shinkansen, which means “new trunk line,” was a separate railway built from scratch, and it revolutionized intercity travel in Japan.
More passengers travel by train in Japan than anywhere else in the world, selling about a billion tickets a year. The first bullet trains began running in 1964, linking Tokyo and Osaka. That line, the Tokaido Shinkansen, remains the busiest fast train line in the world. Modern Shinkansen trains operate at up to 320 kilometers an hour, though they could go faster.
The design has evolved through wind tunnel testing. The nose shape is key. Some trains look blunt, some are streamlined like the German ICE 3, and some have a duckbill shape. That duckbill reduces the pressure wave created when a train surges into a tunnel.
The force of displaced air can cause serious problems, and the pressure wave can travel down the tunnel and out the other end. Trains designed for tunnel-heavy routes use the duckbill to limit that effect. The TGV in France, which began service in 1981, was originally designed for gas turbines, but the oil price crisis of the 1970s put paid to that plan. Electric traction became the power of choice.
The system was a complete rethink of railway technology, designed to be reliable, fast, and safe at the same time. The track is built with the train in mind, with long-radius curves and a smooth surface. On April 3, 2007, a modified TGV set the world speed record for conventional trains, reaching 574. 8 kilometers per hour after the line voltage was boosted and extra ballast was packed onto the track.
The German ICE train has a distinctive nose as well, but for a different reason. At high speeds, the train creates a powerful slipstream behind it. Vortices form in the wake, a bit like angled tornadoes, and they can pull people or objects on the platform. The shape of the nose, which is also the shape of the tail, has a huge effect on this flow.
The vortices are associated with low-pressure regions, which act like suction, dragging the train backward. Other trains draw their power from a live rail beneath the tracks. The London Underground is the most famous. It first ran in 1863 with steam engines, and the first electric trains ran in 1890.
Since the early 1960s, all Tube trains have been electric multiple units, drawing 750 volts of direct current from a live rail through a contact shoe. The network now covers more than 400 kilometers and carries almost a billion and a half passengers a year. It is the oldest underground system in the world, though Seoul’s system holds the record for route length at over 900 kilometers, New York serves the most stations with 468, and Tokyo Metro is the busiest with 3. 3 billion journeys a year.
Driverless trains are an increasing trend. The Dubai Metro, which opened in 2009, is fully automated with no drivers at all. It covers about 75 kilometers and serves 49 stations, with expansion planned. It draws power from a live third rail, which requires a secure right of way to keep people away from the electrical circuits.
Elevated trains have also been a fixture of urban transit since early on, from Chicago’s L to the monorails of Disneyland, Tokyo, and Bangkok. There are even hanging trains, like the Wuppertal Schwebebahn in Germany, which has been running suspended from a single rail above the streets since 1901. It is fondly known as the old girl. Special trains have always captured people’s affection.
Japan’s Shikishima is an ultra-luxury train with Michelin chefs, all-suite accommodation, and observation cars. It is a golden piece of modern design, but it runs on a rather traditional diesel-electric power plant with a top speed of just 100 kilometers an hour. It is exclusively for short tours in northern Japan. The Indian Palace on Wheels takes its cue from the decorative traditions of princely India, evoking the days of maharajahs and the British Raj.
The Orient Express, legendary in its heyday, linked Paris and Istanbul, carrying heads of state and celebrities, and later becoming the setting for Agatha Christie’s famous murder mystery. It was a smart business plan to provide comfort and quality accommodation on a train that didn’t require changing, with deals struck across multiple borders to keep the same train running through several countries. Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway is a different matter entirely. It is not a tourist novelty but a vital communication link across the world’s largest nation.
The line, more than 9,000 kilometers long, links Moscow to Russia’s Far East and is the longest railway in the world. Construction began in the 1890s and was completed in 1916. The Tsar chose a 5-foot broad gauge, unique to Russia, which caused bottlenecks at borders with Poland and China during both World Wars, but it helped protect the borders. Today, about 30% of Russia’s exports travel on the line, and about 200,000 freight containers reach Europe on it each year.
After the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, when inadequate railways meant the failure to reinforce the Far East, the line received heavy investment. That paid off in the Second World War, when moving the Siberian Reserve to meet the German invasion was crucial to the Soviet Union’s survival. Trains have also been part of military planning almost from the start. The first extensive use of trains in war came in the 1850s, during the Crimean War, when troops were brought to the front en masse.
That pattern repeated in the American Civil War, when Union volunteers commandeered a train and took it north, doing as much damage as possible to the vital rail line from Atlanta to Chattanooga, pursued by Confederate forces first on foot and then on a succession of locomotives. That event was recreated in Buster Keaton’s 1926 silent film The General. In the Second World War, railways were vital to moving war materials and personnel to the ports and on to the battlefields. They also made possible the largest caliber gun ever used in combat.
Krupp built the Schwerer Gustav, designed for the French Maginot Line, and the slightly smaller but more practical K5, which could fire a 255-kilogram shell 64 kilometers at a rate of 15 rounds an hour. The K5 formed the basis for the M65 atomic cannon, nicknamed Atomic Annie, developed in the USA after the war, capable of firing a nuclear shell. High-speed rail tracks have also been used to test missile submunitions. Test sleds run new missiles down the track, then stop the sled dead, releasing the missile to impact a target.
In New Mexico, the 846 Test Squadron of the US Air Force broke the world speed record for a maglev vehicle, with a rocket-powered sled reaching almost 1,020 kilometers an hour. That record surpassed the one set in 1954 by Colonel John Stapp, known as the fastest man on Earth, who had been accelerated to 1,017 kilometers an hour. Stapp wasn’t concerned with speed for its own sake but with what happened to a human subjected to major G-forces on rapid acceleration. He demonstrated that a human being can withstand 46 G.
At the opposite end of the railway spectrum from the luxury and the speed records are the heavy haul trains of Western Australia. In the Pilbara region, iron ore trains typically approach 240 cars, or around 30,000 tons. A Rio Tinto operation hauls 29,500 tons of iron ore in a train 2. 4 kilometers long, pulled by three locomotives.
A BHP Billiton train has 268 cars and carries 24,200 tons. Driving a fully loaded ore train is a real skill. Get the acceleration or deceleration wrong, and you can break the train in two. On the record run of June 21, 2001, a train with 682 wagons, stretching 7.
352 kilometers, was hauled by eight 6,000-horsepower diesel-electric locomotives and controlled by a single driver. And then there is Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world’s largest model railway. More than 7,000 square meters of floor space house nearly 15,500 meters of track, along which more than 1,000 trains run through 1,300 signals, in a world populated by about 265,000 figures. About 3,500 of those figures are stolen every year.
Building it has cost about 20 million euros and employs some 270 people. The most futuristic train ideas are still on the drawing board. The Hyperloop concept, in an advanced stage for Dubai and proposed for routes like New York to Washington, aims to send capsules through a steel tube kept in a partial vacuum. Removing the air removes aerodynamic drag, which is why spacecraft can travel so fast without overheating.
In the original concept from Elon Musk, each capsule floats on a thin layer of air, about 0. 5 to 1. 3 millimeters thick, with linear induction motors along the tube accelerating and decelerating the pods. The concept promised a top speed of 1,220 kilometers an hour, which would make the journey from New York to Washington take just under half an hour.
Personal rapid transport systems are already in operation at airports like London’s Heathrow, shuttling passengers between terminals and parking hubs. The story of power on the rails began with the search for a smooth journey and reduced friction. It continued with streamlining and better ways of producing power. And with the Hyperloop, it reaches the point of almost eliminating friction entirely, getting rid of rails, and generating enormous speed while using very little power.
Designs that belonged to science fiction not long ago are now carrying paying passengers, and the power of the railway, transformed though it might be, shows no signs of diminishing.
