Comments on: Insanity Rears its Ugly Head in Michigan

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:00:40 +0000

I met the inventor, Mr Sutton, around 2001 in a personal meeting when he pitched this idea to government agency where I worked. I’ll always remember it as a particularly surreal experience. It was like watching a man being eaten alive by his own obsessive idea.

By: Ocean Railroader

Ocean Railroader — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:22:47 +0000

I’d be worred about what happens when maglv meets up with the age old habit of defurred railroad repairs like all the railroad lines like to do in the US and have been doing for the last 40 years. Say if there was a maglv line that manged to break even but didn’t pay off wouldn’t they start cutting costs on repairs. Also wouldn’t buying parts for the maglv lines be far more expensive then buying off the self stardard rairoad parts.

By: Eric G.

Eric G. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:04:50 +0000

I used to think that Maglev was really cool – for the obvious reason that it floats on air. What kid doesn’t love playing with magnets? and trains? so the marriage seems like a child’s perfect fantasy – and that’s just what it is. When you pay some respect to physics, the apparent advantages of Maglev actually turn to liabilities. The advantage of floating on air is supposedly overcoming friction, but friction is not always bad. Trains need to stop. It takes a lot of energy to make a heavy trainset move forward, but with friction you can recapture and reuse some of that energy with regenerative braking on the stopping end of your trip segment. If your train is floating on magnets, you need to use massive energy to start it up — AND to stop it. That just doesn’t make sense.
Why spend so much on maglev when today’s state of the art HSR is capable of doing 300mph. If you need to go faster, you can use an airplane.
Maglev is fascinating but impractical. Disney should build one. Taxpayers should not.

By: SpyOne

SpyOne — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:39:54 +0000

I’ve been looking at Interstate Traveler’s site for some time, and I still can’t figure out how this thing is supposed to work. The link labeled “Hydrogen Maglev” leads to a gallery of pictures, which collectively offer some clue. However, the picture titled “Energy Cycle” appears to show solar photovoltaic cells being used to electrolysise water which is then used in fuelcells to generate electricity to add to the power grid. At no point does it show power being used for anything other than putting it into the grid, so the system is far less efficient than it could be, since connecting the solar cells directly would be better. I suppose it could be providing water purification also, but that could also probably be done more efficiently by other methods.

Oh, and the entire thing is being watched by a human brain provided by Sun Microsystems, but not actually attached to anything. If the Star Trek episode “Spock’s Brain” taught us nothing else, it illustrated the dubious merit of using disembodied brains as a control system.

The 12-year-old in me thinks the fire engine looks cool, but the adult realizes that no government is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a vehicle with such limited uses, and that other adults would realize that too, so the presence of that image argues against the artist and the web designer being adults, regardless of their chronological age.

Simply put, that site looks BAD. It looks like a Junior High student’s site for his Really Cool Idea(tm), not like the site for a real company or a real engineer. If Interstate Traveler expects to be taken seriously, they need better information on a better looking site. Their failure to provide something better lends credence to the idea that they don’t HAVE something better.
What patents does Interstate Traveler hold? What patents does it hold license to? Are there existing blueprints for ANY of the system’s components?

Why does their claim that they can build miles of track in a day link to a Google search for the term “miles of rails”. How could anyone expect a site like that to be taken seriously? Or rather, anyone over 12.

By: Rich Rosner, PE

Rich Rosner, PE — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:30:40 +0000

I am glad to see some people have brains in their heads. The concept is great, to massively improve our transportation systems, but nothing is technically correct with his proposal. He seems to be able to make sh*t flow uphill. Dreams are good but lets not waste time and effort on one not possible when we have so many important things to do.

If you visit my website be easy on me I made it myself and host it from home.

By: erok

erok — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:05:34 +0000

here’s a website of his promoting a biodome project: http://www.jesuttons-biodome.org

it starts: I began the BioDome concept with the goal in mind of creating extra-terrestrial habitats for a permanent Lunar Colony. However! It did not take long for me to realize that we need to build these right here on earth!!

By: Laurence E. Blow

Laurence E. Blow — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:28:47 +0000

Speaking only about the German Transrapid maglev (not the Japanese high-speed system) its electromagnetic field effects have been tested by experts over the years and have been found to have no short- or long-term effects on humans.

See the federal report at http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/RRdev/fra0211.pdf to see that maglev is fully compatible with
environmental performance goals and with current human exposure safety limits.

By: Jess

Jess — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:57:20 +0000

“the American Computer Science Association would not have given him its coveted Sir Isaac Newton Award”…. what award? The ACSA website reads like a Dr. Bonner’s Soap label and their page about their 2006 Board of Directors nominations that apparently never held elections to became the Board of Directors implies more snake-oil to me…. not mentioned the Google Ads…. It’s 2009, you’d think if they were so technologically advanced they would have managed to confirm their board and update their website by now.

I commend people for thinking outside the box, but looking over that Interstate Traveler Website I see all kinds of issues. Free Fuel? What free fuel? Water is NOT free, and huge quantities of distilled water certainly aren’t free.

By: Jess

Jess — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:22:42 +0000

Besides…. we still don’t know enough about the long term effects of electro-magnetic fields on human tissue. The French managed 370+mph with their TGV without the health risks that might be involved with long term exposure to EMF, why don’t we just try building ONE real HSR train in this country with proven technology before we start trying to build experimental technologies?

Talk about your Springfield Monorail con jobs.

By: Jess

Jess — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:16:49 +0000

Once again we have people touting unproven, pie-in-the-sky technology rather than adopting proven technologies that are being used daily everywhere else in the world.

The Japanese have been studying Maglev from here to Sunday, and have a good operational test track running. But even with all their experience they can’t figure out to build a production Maglev system that makes financial sense.

We can’t even manage conventional High Speed Rail (HSR) in this country that comes close to the Europeans or Asians, yet we want to chase “Futurama” when we use a pitiful 110mph as the definition of HSR here.. I do think it’s about time we made better use of Interstate Highway right-of-ways and monobeams/monorails for transit alternatives; and let’s retool the shuttered auto plants to build alternative vehicles, but let’s leave the Jetsons alone and just concentrate on crawling, then walking, and maybe running before we set our sights on flying!!!

I’ve seen too many “private” projects that turned into public buy-outs. I’ll take a real world HSR that travels at 200mph+ over a pipe dream any day.