SHANGHAI — China took delivery on Friday of a maglev passenger train that travels at up to 430 kph (270 mph), with the German makers hoping it will convince Beijing to spend billions of dollars on more, a wire service reported.
The train will run on the first commercial rail link using mangnetic levitation, a 66 km (40 mile) S-shaped link between Shanghai and its new international airport, with a VIP test run scheduled for next year and a public launch in late 2003.
The Transrapid consortium, made up of Siemens AG, ThyssenKrupp AG and the German government, hopes the 1.2 billion euro ($1.16 billion) airport link will lead to much bigger things.
Engineers from ThyssenKrupp — the partner that made the trains — began unloading the three-car carriage at a container terminal in Shanghai on Friday morning and expected to deliver it to the project’s maintenance site by the end of the day.
Transrapid spokesmen had no immediate comment.
For China, the maglev line is among a raft of superlatives planned for the showpiece city of Shanghai, including the world’s tallest building, the world’s tallest hotel and world’s biggest Ferris wheel.
The maglev project has an important date on January 1.
The 100-tonne driverless train that can move in either direction will take a group of China’s top policymakers on a dizzying eight-minute, 30-km trip that could determine the future of the technology in China, so far the only country to buy it.
BILLIONS IN THE BALANCE
At stake for Transrapid is billions of dollars in future contracts in China, including a maglev link between Shanghai and Beijing — at an estimated cost of $22 billion — and perhaps a southern loop joining Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
Maglev has been developed and tested in both Germany and Japan for almost 30 years, but Germany got a leg up by winning the first ever commercial maglev contract.
Chinese policymakers and German executives say they have talked about using maglev technology for several other routes in China, but the project’s managers have said future contracts depend on the success of the VIP run on January 1.
“There have been no decisions made about future projects,” Guenter Weckerlein, the consortium’s Shanghai general manager told Reuters this week.
Sources familiar with the Shanghai project said two kilometres of the rail line had yet to be finished before the first test runs can begin, which would be next month at the earliest.
The Shanghai project is also key for engineers to understand the technology better: they have never had a chance to study the wind effects of two such trains passing.
The Shanghai project is a complete circuit and will have to trains passing as each hits speeds of up to 430 kph (270 mph), while the German test track is a single back-and-forth line.