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Maglev train still on cards for German city despite disaster
2006-09-25
The German city of Munich is still planning to build a magnetic levitation train line despite last week's collision on a test track in which 23 people were killed, officials have said. The futuristic high-speed train crashed into a maintenance vehicle on the track in western Germany on Friday. Investigators are blaming the collision on a disastrous breakdown in communications. In Shanghai, the only city with a Transrapid in commercial use, officials said they had no concerns about the safety of their system. The accident has cast a shadow over efforts to market the magnetic levitation train, also known as maglev, which was developed in a joint venture by German engineering giants Siemens and ThyssenKrupp. Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said after a meeting with the companies' representatives on Sunday that "major safety failings" were the cause of the crash. But the transport minister of Bavaria, Erwin Huber, said the state capital, Munich, was still considering building a Transrapid line to link its commercial centre and international airport. The process to gain approval for the Munich project should end in the middle of next year, Huber told Bayerischer Rundfunk radio. "That timetable will not be called into question because the security concept will subsequently be improved." He denied that Tiefensee had expressed reservations about the plans for Munich. "The federal transport minister never announced a change to the timetable, he only said in reply to a question that safety was of the highest priority," Huber said. The Transrapid is powered by a magnetic force field and 'floats' about one centimetre (half an inch) above the track, allowing it to reach speeds of up to 450 kilometres (280 miles) per hour. Despite the revolutionary technology, its high costs have discouraged rail operators from using the system. The only city to have bought a Transrapid train, Shanghai, said on Monday its three-year-old line from the city centre to Pudong international airport was operating without problems. "Everything is in normal operation, and there is no special examination being carried out," said Chen Sheng, an official from the Shanghai Maglev company. China has been keen to build a 170-kilometre (105-mile) extension to the existing line to take passengers from Shanghai to the city of Hangzhou. But lengthy discussions have not made much progress, with German officials rejecting Chinese demands for access to sensitive technology on the train, press reports say. The German daily Die Welt reported on Sunday that it was increasingly unlikely the extension would get the go-ahead because of its estimated 4.3 billion dollar cost. However, there was a boost for the maglev technology when one of Japan's main railway operators on Monday announced plans to spend 355 billion yen (3.1 billion dollars) developing magnetic trains. Central Japan Railway Co. said it wanted to extend a magnetic levitation test track in central Yamanashi prefecture to 42.2 kilometres as part of a 10-year development plan. Meanwhile, three of the 10 people injured in the crash in Lathen near the Dutch border were allowed to leave hospital. Prosecutors said they wanted to question all the staff responsible for the functioning of the train, including the two control room employees whose job it was to observe the track. They could face manslaughter charges. Authorities said 21 of the dead were men and two were women, all aged between 40 and 66. Two US citizens were among those killed while 10 were employees of the RWE energy company who had been riding on the train on a business trip.
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