Another gadgetbahnen bites the dust, hopefully.
They already have perfectly good Skinkansen service between Tokyo and Osaka that takes 2 hours for the 500 km ride. Is there really a need to go any faster than that?
Intercity Maglevs (or any other technology inherently incomptible with legacy rail or HSR technology) may only ever make sense in either:
1) countries which are obscenely rich, yet have not yet built a significant legacy rail network, or
2) HSR corridors which have reached their capacity limit.
At somewhere around 15 trains per hour, the Tokkaido Shinkansen is the only corridor on this planet which satisfy that second condition. There is a strong case to build the Chuo (Maglev) Shinkansen, but I wouldn’t hold my breath that we see a second such line getting built and completed anywhere else on this planet within our lifetimes…
Agreed however. Bringing the Tokaido Line up to 220 would seem to be a much better use of cash. The speed of the line, however, seems to be a bit of a red herring. It’s fast enough already, and the frequency is amazing.
Beyond a relatively low speed level (~50 mph for cars on a highway), there is an inverse relationship between speed and capacity (which is why cars in dense highway traffic first slow down to moderate speeds before it becomes a crawl and eventually a standstill).
From memory, these are the minimum required distances until the next stop signal for HSR trainsets in Germany to reach certain speeds and you can clearly see how that minimum distance rises exponentionally with speed (e.g., 250 km/h is 25% faster than 200 km/h, but requires a 100% longer movement authority, which takes 60% longer to trave through):
Design Speed (km/h) | Required movement authority (m) | Travel time at design speed to cover length of required movement authority (sec) |
160
[100 mph] | 1,200 | 27 |
200
[125 mph] | 2,000 | 36 |
250
[155 mph] | 4,000 | 58 |
300
[185 mph] | 9,600 | 115 |
330
[205 mph] | 13,300 | 142 |
Once you acknowledge that „capacity“ is the main constraint on the Tokkaido Shinkansen (rather than: “speed” or “travel times”), you might have an easier time conceding that increasing the design speed would exacerbate rather than mitigate the problem they are trying to solve…