1. maglove the maglev
March 6th, 2008
First thing was leaving the airport, which can be done in several ways. The best one is taking the new maglev train. If you check out that site and look at the little flash animation on the right, titled ‘virtual travel’, that’s exactly what it’s like, including jerking music.
I could post a picture of the view from the train, but it’s rather ordinary and despite zipping by at 431kms per hour, the scenery didn’t blur on the camera. I was kind of surprised that the whole thing still vibrated quite a bit—I would have thought that the Lev as in levitation part of maglev would have solved that.
It did speed up rather quickly, without it feeling like it was. The whole thing was over very fast, ten minutes in fact. I kind of thought that in order to really savour the experience of being on the world’s first hispeed-maglev train, they should’ve slowed it down for a bit.
What’s it look like to the naked eye, going at that speed across land? One way to find out is to stick your head out the car window and down towards the ground. Keep stretching and eventually things will buzz by in roughly the same fashion.
