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Why hasn't the UK built superfast trains?

This article is more than 15 years old
The Tories have embraced the world's quickest and safest rail system, but questions remain over cost

If the Conservative party wins the next general election, would it be willing to build an ultra-fast rail link that could connect London and Manchester in just 45 minutes? Certainly anyone who heard George Osborne's speech last week might be tempted to think so. The shadow chancellor was in Tokyo to praise the efforts of Japanese business to find technological ways of cutting carbon emissions and to take a ride on the fastest train in the world.

The Maglev - it stands for "magnetic levitation" - is a train that floats on a magnetised cushion of air and can be impelled along a track at speeds approaching 600kph. On paper it looks like the kind of blue-sky thinking the Tories are keen to espouse.

But anyone who has been following the Maglev will know that the test track in the foothills of Mount Fuji was an ill-advised destination. Despite the technical prowess of the engineers, Japanese politicians have categorically failed to build a Maglev network since the mid-1970s. If George Stevenson had taken as long to tweak his Rocket, the world might be a very different place today.

Faster, greener, cheaper

The appeal of Maglev is easy to demonstrate. Despite its initial start-up costs, a Maglev train operating on the major trunk routes could eliminate domestic airline competition, being able to travel between London and Birmingham in half an hour, London to Manchester in 45 minutes and London to Edinburgh in less than two hours. And despite a price of £25m per kilometre, the cost of the track is only half that of the Channel tunnel rail link.

The Maglev is also potentially greener too. According to Dr Alan James of UK Ultraspeed, a Maglev carrying 1,200 passengers between London and Manchester would emit 40g of CO2 per passenger. A jet airliner emits 275g.

Mr Osborne was also keen to point out ( that the Japanese Maglev had been built "almost entirely out of privately raised finance," and that the company that built the 19-mile track "think that they will get a good return on their investment". But the kind of investment required to make the figures work on a national scale is beyond a single company, even one as efficient and profitable as the Japan Railways (JR).

The reason: the Japanese Maglev has a very symbolic ancestor. More than 40 years ago, the Japanese built the world's first high-speed rail link connecting the two great urban conurbations of Tokyo and Osaka. The shinkansen - popularly known as the bullet train - whisks millions of commuters across Japan at speeds UK rail engineers can only covet. Even at the venerable age of 42, it remains by far the safest and most punctual railway network in the world. It has yet to record a single fatal accident and measures late running of its trains not in minutes, but in tenths of seconds.

The network is privately run, but it wasn't built by private finance. It was built by the Japanese government - augmented by a huge loan from the World Bank - and only passed into private hands after years of healthy profit, and to this day receives huge government subsidies.

So are we likely to see a similar effort to replace the shinkansen sometime soon? Ask the engineers at the Maglev test track in Yamanashi and they shrug and look wistfully into the distance. The shinkansen may rarely be late, but the Maglev is years overdue. Mr Osborne could have chosen Shanghai as a location to make a speech about "21st century transport". The Chinese have built a working Maglev connecting the city centre with Pudong airport. Built by Transrapid, a German company, the 19-mile journey takes just over seven minutes and the train reaches a speed of 430kph. But even here, the Maglev was years overdue; and last month it caught fire, though with no deaths or injuries.

Making the commitment

Talking about Maglevs is undoubtedly exciting. The 18-mile test track in Yamanashi is something of a tourist attraction in its own right. In fact, a cynic might argue it is the most elaborate train set ever assembled. But talking about the Japanese Maglev ducks a really important British political question, which is: when is Britain going to get round to building a high-speed rail system?

Labour's last manifesto promised to look at a north-south high speed link and a final decision awaits the forthcoming transport review, to be published with the pre-budget report. But don't bet on it.

Building either a Maglev or a conventional high-speed rail system - like the shinkansen or the French TGV, which celebrates its 25th anniversary next month - would take a government committed to public projects on a huge scale. It would be comparable to the foundation of the NHS or the building of an independent nuclear deterrent.

Here's a thought, though. The cost of replacing Trident is estimated at £15bn. The cost of building an ultra-fast Maglev line between London and Edinburgh is estimated at £16bn. Gordon Brown, so widely expected to be the next Prime Minister, is in favour of a new deterrent. But he's said nothing about Maglev networks.

· The linear motor: how it works

The Maglev train owes its existence to a pair of English geniuses who lived almost a century apart. The linear motor, the principle that drives Maglev trains, was first invented by Charles Wheatstone as far back as the 1840s. But it wasn't until the work of professor Eric Laithwaite a century later that the idea of ultra-fast passenger systems was first seriously considered.

A linear motor has one significant difference from a conventional motor. Instead of producing rotatory power (which can then, say, turn a shaft), it produces a linear force along its length. The motor has been "unrolled" and is contained not in the train, but in the track. To realise the significance of this, think of the way a chocolate bar moves through a factory. The chocolate has no power of its own, but relies on a series of conveyer belts to move from one end to the other.

A Maglev train works in the same way: the carriage has no engine, save a few very powerful magnets that stop it crashing to the ground or bumping into the walls of the guideway.

You can create a linear motor on your own at home. All you need is a piece of cardboard, some Perspex, a couple of dozen magnets and some sticky-backed tape. Stick 20 magnets to the tape as evenly as you can in parallel lines, making sure their poles are aligned (south to north, south to north and so on). Tape the magnets to the cardboard to create a guideway. Build a couple of walls out of Perspex to keep your Maglev on track and help you witness your experiment. Stick about six more magnets of reverse polarity to another piece of cardboard to create your train. Your train should then float above the track. Give it a gentle push, and it should zoom from one end to the other.