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Clarissa gets ready to board the train
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My trip on 300mph train
Clarissa Satchell4/ 7/2005
WITH its sleek curved nose and tail and the super-narrow track it glides along, this hover train looks more like a supersonic tramway system on Tomorrow's World than a realistic addition to the British rail network.
Despite an estimated £16 billion price tag, the government is said to be considering maglev technology - magnetic levitation - as part of investigations into a high-speed rail link from north to south.
Chancellor Gordon Brown took a trip on the first 311mph passenger service in Shanghai last year.
I travelled to Emsland in north-west Germany where Transrapid, the company behind the Shanghai system, has been running a 19.5-mile test track since the 1980s but it is only now that serious interest seems to be growing.
A 23-mile track linking Munich's central station and airport is planned to open in 2008. The US Congress has commissioned a series of studies into possible links in Washington, Pittsburgh and Las Vegas.
During my visit, a fact-finding delegation from California was also taking a trip on the red and white Transrapid 08.
In this country, Newcastle-based UK Ultraspeed is behind the bid to convince the government of its viability for a 300mph link connecting Glasgow and Edinburgh with London, stopping at major cities including Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle.
As the train hurtles towards 260mph I am slightly concerned to see the "driver" holding his mobile phone in one hand and calmly jotting down notes with the other.
In fact, he is not driving the train at all.
Benefits
That's the job of a team of operators about 10 miles away in a control centre, who watch the progress of the train on a wall covered with screens, cranking up the speed at the flick of a button. It is a strange concept. So much so that when Shanghai opened a 500mph maglev train link last year the operators apparently hired young people to sit in the driver's cab purely to reassure passengers. At the test track, the "driver" is there to compile research information.
As my train gathers speed, it sways gently from side to side and the only indicators of how fast we are going are a digital speedometer, reading over 400km per hour, and the sight of green fields and wind turbines whizzing past outside.
"We're now slowing down," says Alan James from UK Ultraspeed, after a while. "Now we're down to 125mph, the maximum speed of a Pendolino on the West Coast mainline."
After travelling at 260mph this feels positively sleepy. After 25 minutes and two circuits of the track we get off, having covered the distance between Leeds and Manchester - a one hour trip by traditional trains.
Alan is convinced that building the first long distance train link in Britain since the Victorian era is viable, despite an estimated cost of £21million per route km - just over half a mile - and potential planning headaches. The price does not include land costs.
He says "Millions of pounds have been invested in upgrading the West Coast mainline but the problem is, you can't fit new technology over a Victorian system and that is why trains can only travel at 125mph between Manchester and London.
"We believe that we can finance this through private and European investment, so potentially there could be no cost to the taxpayer but the economic benefits for regions like Manchester will be vast."
Should the government be giving serious thought to this sort of train? Have your say.
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4/07/2005 at 13:39
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8/08/2005 at 21:51
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