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?

  • Iron Lynx
    31•2 years ago
    • construction is Hella pricey
    • there are few maglev manufacturers, allowing vendor locking and exacerbating the first point
    • they must be built grade-separate, which can complicate route planning
    • they are incompatible with existing rail tech, which results in having to build new, expensive infrastructure for 100% of your route, further exacerbating the first point
    • their switches are slow, limiting capacity

    Ultimately, their competition is regular trains, which are simpler, more tolerant to buying from multiple manufacturers, still significantly more efficient and faster than anything roadborne, able to switch over the course of seconds instead of minutes, able to interoperate with different tiers of intensity and speed, able to be built at grade, cheaper and having the better part of two hundred years of technological refinement behind it. Ultimately, maglev has specific, niche advantages that make it a hard sell for any system that already has regular rail.