They were invented decades ago.
They have fewer moving parts than wheelbois.
They require less maintenance.
There’s obviously some bottleneck in expanding maglev technology, but what is it?
They were invented decades ago.
They have fewer moving parts than wheelbois.
They require less maintenance.
There’s obviously some bottleneck in expanding maglev technology, but what is it?
They’re very expensive to build. That’s it, really.
If it had a significant advantage the expense would be worth it, but steel wheels on steel rails already have a coefficient of friction 10x lower than rubber tires on asphalt, so it’s not worth it.
You do save money on them in the long-run. I just assume it takes decades to get all that return on investment back out, thus any entity interested mainly in quarterly profits has little incentive to make the investment, which would be disruptive to their finances in the near-term.
Is that assuming there will not be major repairs?
Fewer major repairs is the way they save you money. Fewer moving parts, less friction, less wear and tear. All the energy savings gets tossed out the window in the interest of going faster, in the ones we’ve made so far anyway.
There may be fewer moving parts but that does not necessarily mean cheaper/less repairs. Current railway parts (especially wheels) are fairly low tech and easily fixed. What if the cooling of a superconducting magnet fails? That’s expensive.
Sure, I didn’t say they never require maintenance or anything. Simply that over a long period of time they become cheaper to operate, after taking into account repair and replacement costs.
If you don’t take repair and replacement costs into account, they become more expensive. This is probably another reason there are not many of them. Repair is where they save you the money though, due to how infrequently they require it.