SS Connection

While high-speed maglev infrastructure is costly to construct, maglev trains are less costly to operate and maintain than conventional high-speed trains or planes and this is because the majority of the power required to overcome air drag is consumed at greater speeds.

Maglev systems can travel at high speeds almost constantly without deteriorating, making them more cost-effective to operate than wheel/rail rapid transit systems, which require frequent maintenance and undergo exponentially increasing erosion as speed increases. One of the key advantages of maglev high-speed systems is their inherent immunity from mechanical erosion.

Maglev is the first conducted transportation system that operates with virtually minimal mechanical friction. All of the vehicle's weight, power, and guidance forces, including braking forces, are delivered contactlessly to the guideway in a maglev train. As a result, some maglev systems have maintenance costs that are a small proportion of those of typical wheel or rail systems.

Robert H. Goddard, the famed American rocket scientist who would later be honored by NASA for his creation of the liquid-fueled rocket, first proposed the notion of a magnetically levitated train as a physics graduate student in 1909. Eric Laithwaite, a British electrical engineer at Imperial College London, created the first full-size working model of linear motor induction in the late 1940s. In the 1960s, this notion and its promise were improved. And in 1967, two American physicists working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Dr. Gordon T. Danby and Dr. James R. Powell, were awarded the first patent explaining the mechanics of a maglev train.

In the late 1960s, Brookhaven's James Powell and Gordon Danby secured the first patent for a magnetically levitated train design. Powell had the concept while stuck in traffic, thinking that there must be a better method to travel on land than vehicles or trains. He came up with the notion of levating a train car using superconducting magnets. Superconducting magnets are electromagnets that are cooled to extremely low temperatures while in use, greatly increasing the magnetic field's power.

The first commercially operating high-speed superconducting Maglev train began service in Shanghai in 2004, with others in Japan and South Korea following suit. A number of routes are being investigated in the United States to connect cities such as Baltimore and Washington, D.C.