Crash may be last straw for expensive maglev train

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Sep 23, 2006, 19:27 GMT

Hamburg - The destruction of the prototype of Germany's magnetic-levitation (maglev) train in a disaster costing 23 lives may finish off the futuristic project permanently, several German newspapers suggested Saturday.

The maglev has always sucked in vast public subsidies, a relic of an era when government 'industrial policies' were often based on applying seed money to what politicians hoped were the trends of tomorrow.

The Transrapid system, in which magnetism is used to lift a train above its track and propel it, is a technological marvel, but also a far more expensive mode of transportation to build than bullet trains or airliners.

The investigation so far suggests human error, both by the control room that set the three-car train, code-named TR08, on its way and the drivers who noticed too late a maintenance vehicle blocking the track, played a main role in Friday's high-speed crash.

Amid the mourning in Germany for the crew of five and 18 visitors enjoying the thrill of speed, engineers are already wondering what would have to be changed to convince the public that the Transrapid is safe.

For three decades, the Transrapid consortium has lobbied for government funding with the promise of a vast export industry and jobs. Joyrides for 18 euros a time on the TR08 at the test track have impressed half a million Germans since 1999.

With political commitment the key to the project, the disaster may harm the Transrapid far more than warnings from accountants or environmentalists, because pride and trust have been compromised.

The newspaper Berliner Morgenpost said Saturday that plans to build Germany's second Transrapid track between Munich and its airport, mainly at federal expense, looked unlikely to ever bear fruit.

The government had in fact recently sounded more willing to appropriate hundreds of millions of euros for both the Munich scheme and a major extension of the 30-kilometre line in Shanghai, China that was completed in 2003 mainly with German grants.

At the time of the crash, German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee was in talks in China on a 35-kilometre extension to that line to carry visitors to the 2010 Shanghai Expo.

After the crash, Tiefensee and Bavarian Premier Edmund Stoiber affirmed that talks on the 1.85-billion-euro (2.35-billion dollars) Munich project would continue.

The project is currently stymied by a shortfall in funding, with Bavaria state and the German rail company Deutsche Bahn only pledging 185 million euros apiece and the federal government appropriating 550 million euros.

Some see parallels between the Transrapid and the story of passenger airships, which effectively ended in 1937 when a German zeppelin, the Hindenburg, caught fire while docking in New Jersey.

Although it was possible to make airships safer by using helium instead of hydrogen gas, that crash destroyed public confidence in airships as a mode of transport and ended investment in them.