Mine’s Faster Than Yours
Riding Shanghai’s maglev, the world’s fastest train.
By Henry Blodget
Posted Monday, March 21, 2005, at 9:23 AM PT
Chairman Maglev
When you finish lugging your bags through Shanghai’s massive Pudong International airport and recover from the blast of cigarette smoke in the lobby, you have two main ways to get to town. First, a taxi. Second, the world’s fastest train. For me, that’s an easy choice.
In a drive to reclaim its historical place in the cosmos—biggest and best—China is notching one superlative after another (biggest dam, highest hotel, etc.). In an effort to climb the industrial food chain, meanwhile, it is also acquiring technology from anyone willing to share it. So, in 2001, with Germany’s Transrapid International seeking a place to demonstrate its magnetic levitation train—and apparently willing to give the technology away in the process—China killed two birds with one stone. Shanghai’s maglev began full operation in March, 2004, covering the 20 miles from Pudong to the outskirts of the city in a blistering 7 minutes and 20 seconds.
To get to the maglev from Pudong’s central terminal, you lug your bags down an endless corridor to a dome-shaped atrium with an information booth, a ticket window, and new-age piano music emanating from invisible speakers. You fork over 50 renminbi—$6—and schlep into a gold-pillared room resembling a Chinese banquet hall. You wait there, still enveloped in Muzak, and contemplate a maglev mural displayed like a portrait of Chairman Mao. Then you descend an escalator to the track—or, rather, because maglevs don’t have tracks, the monorail-style “guideway” that the train whooshes along.
A moment later, the train floats in. And “float” is the word. Thanks to its electromagnetic levitation system, the train hovers a half-inch above the track. It floats like a cigarette boat gliding into a slip, the surprisingly blunt nose emitting a marvelous, rumbling growl. With m