Train Travel

Here in the United States, railroad train travel was instrumental in bridging the East Coast with the Wild West. The romance and intrigue of the Orient Express in Europe has been immortalized in literature, television, and movies. Train travel is employed everywhere to move people from one city to another in relatively comfortable and economic fashion.

There may be big changes coming on the horizon for typical travel as we know it today, though. Locomotive engines towing Pullman sleeper cars may become a thing of the past if the maglev comes to town.

Maglev is an easier way to say magnetic levitation, which basically means train travel can reach speeds of over 300 miles per hour by means of electromagnetic propulsion and levitation. The absence engines and fossil fuels to operate these trains is a big advantage to current technology. Many maglev advocates tout them as being a revolutionary wave of the future.

For the most part, magnetically levitated train travel is still in design and development phases but China and Germany actually have such trains in operation.

Train travel on the first commercial run of a maglev occurred in China in December 2003. This historic train travel adventure left the Longyang Road station in downtown Shanghai and arrived less than 10 minutes later at the Pudong airport, 19 miles away. Train travel speed on this trip averaged 267 miles per hour.

Once maglev technology has been perfected and appropriate infrastructure installed, train travel time from Rome to Paris is expected to take hardly more than two hours. Traveling at sustained speeds of more than 300 miles per hour, maglev train travel is about half as fast as airplane travel, which tops out around 560 miles per hour.