Is it a Bird? A Plane?

Nope, only Shanghai's flashy new Maglev, the world's fastest train. Way ahead of its time seven decades ago, the still-futuristic magnetic levitation system may yet redefine travel everywhere.
LIKE MANY ON THE MAINLAND, I was on the move over the Chinese New Year. My flight lifted off early on the last morning of the Year of the Horse, touching down at the airport eight minutes later. Yet it never left the ground.
My flight - that's what it was called - was aboard Shanghai's spanking-new Maglev (magnetic levitation) train, the world's fastest, most futuristic passenger line.

Longest-awaited, too, since it's been an astonishing seven decades since the invention of the process that was finally put to a test on the next-to-the-last day of last year, when Premier Zhu Rongji took an inaugural ride with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, which helped fund and build this line. Now, common cadres were having a turn.

Local media called them "joyrides," these series of trial runs to the international airport in Pudong, across the river from Shanghai proper, that add a bit of flash to the Spring Festival. They certainly live up to the billing.

Smiles abound inside the sleek train as, with a breathtaking whoosh, it rockets to 300 kilometers per hour in two minutes flat. Overhead, like a giant scoreboard, an LED blinks out our record-breaking progress till we top 430 kph.

"It's wonderful," says Lu Cong Mei, who came with her husband, sister and several other relatives. Lu plops into a window seat with her shopping bag of thermal underwear from China's famous undergarment maker Three Gun (motto: "Cozy and Elastic) and gleefully watches scenery flash past like in a Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon.

"Amazing," she comments afterwards. "I'll tell all my friends to try it." Grandson Dai Wei, 14, adds: "It is fast, really fast. Way faster than I expected. It felt like flying."
Indeed, the Maglev is faster than any speeding locomotive precisely because it's as much like a plane as any railroad we've known.

True, the train has no wings, but no wheels or engine, either. Transrapid, the German firm that developed the system, describes the Maglev as "the first fundamental innovation in the field of railway technology since the invention of the railway."

Magnets are the attraction. First, powerful magnets lift the entire train about 10 millimeters above the special track, called a guideway, since it mainly directs the passage of the train.

Other magnets provide propulsion, and braking, and the speeds - up to 500 kph in test runs; a good 60 percent faster than the renowned Bullet Trains - are attained largely due to the reduction of friction.

Is there a need for such speed? Certainly not on such a short sprint, barely 30 kilometers from the subway in Pudong to the airport.

And not at the cost, note critics. The Pudong line, which should go into operation by the end of this year, is unlikely to ever recoup its $1.2 billion investment.

A high-speed link between Beijing and Shanghai, among several additional Chinese lines under consideration, might cost $22-30 billion, or nearly as much as China intends to invest in all rail infrastructure nationwide in its current five-year plan.

Still, critics miss the point. And the thrill. The Maglev isn't about getting from point A to B in Pudong. Rather, it's the ride, a glorious glide, from the past to the future.

And where this new train might take us, not simply San Francisco to Los Angeles, say, in less than two hours, but in a flash, from the mundane motion of nowadays to the hyper-speeds of Tomorrowland.