Japan to invest $3.1bn to develop 'maglev' trains

TOKYO: Central Japan Railway will invest 355bn yen ($3.1bn) to develop high-speed magnetic trains in Japan over the next decade, the company said Monday, just days after deadly crash of an experimental magnetic train in Germany.

The spending will expand a test track just west of Tokyo in Yamanashi prefecture and fund new magnetically levitated, or “maglev”, trains carriages. The announcement comes after a maglev crashed Friday on a test track in Germany, killing 23 people.

Maglev trains are the fastest in the world and skim over a guideway on powerful magnetic fields without touching the track. That cuts friction and enables speeds of up to 581 km per hour.

The technology is still under development, although there are two short stretches of commercially operating maglev trains, one in Shanghai and the other in the central Japanese city of Nagoya.

The move comes as Germany and Japan jostle to win new customers for the high speed trains. German Traffic Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee was in China at the time of the accident trying to urge officials there to extend their use of the German-made technology along the Shanghai, a contract that Japan competed for but lost.

“We can’t speak for the German company,” Central Japan Railway spokesman Taro Yoshikawa said. “But we’ve conducted extensive testing on our technology, and from a safety point of view, there are no concerns.” There have been no fatalities in test runs of the company’s maglev, and the train has set a speed record with passengers aboard of 581 km and hour, Mr Yoshikawa said.

The investment plans call for extending the company’s 18.4 km test track to 42.8 km by March ’17. Included is 36bn yen ($310m) earmarked for new maglev trains. Central Japan Railway said over the weekend that the German crash won’t affect its testing plans, but the Japanese government said it is closely watching what German investigators conclude about the cause of the crash.

Central Japan Railway completed a maglev test run Saturday with about 100 passengers, and the company is still planning a special event on November 22-24, inviting 1,800 people to ride the train at its test centre. Japan’s only commercially operating magnetic-levitation train, the local Linimo train near Nagoya, carries passengers on a 8.9-km track at top speeds of 100 km an hour.

Planners eventually want Japan’s maglev service to connect Tokyo and Osaka with high speed trains, shortening the trip between Japan’s two biggest cities to an hour, compared with the Shinkansen bullet train’s 2.5 hours.