中国科学家正研究终极版高速列车

News that Chinese scientists are conducting research in the hope of developing a maglev train that would reach speeds of up to 2,000 km/has it rockets through an underwater tube made my jaw drop – until I realized that man’s constant search for speed isn’t that new.

Close to where I live in southeast London lie Sydenham Woods, the last trace of the Great South Wood that covered most of the Home counties around London in medieval times.

Hidden among the undergrowth are the remains of an extraordinary experiment by an enterprising railway engineer and inventor called Thomas Webster Rammell.

In 1864, dissatisfied with the slow, messy, and dirty business of early steam trains, he came up with the idea of a pneumatic-powered train that would shoot passengers in an open carriage from A to B via a sealed, relatively air-tight tunnel.

So far, so good. He’d already experimented with a pneumatic railway for the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, to convey letters in vacuum-driven wagons.

What doesn’t seem to have been taken into account is the effect of such a ride on human passengers.

Consisting of a carriage fitted with a large collar of bristles, the conveyance, with its hapless passengers, was sucked along an airtight tunnel. It operated for a little more than two months, and was believed to be a demonstration line for a more permanent link between Waterloo on the south bank of the River Thames and the government buildings in central London’s Whitehall.

Construction was started, but never finished. To this day, locals talk of people with ruptured eardrums and rumors abound of ghosts. A local woman even claimed in 1930 to have seen an old railway wagon full of skeletons in Victorian costume. Never substantiated, of course. The sleepers and part of the tunnel exist to this day.

Thus ended that particular attempt at speeding up transport.

Flash forward, if you will, to 1976, when the joint Franco-British supersonic airliner Concorde entered service with British Airways and Air France.

Capable of more than twice the speed of sound, at Mach 2.04 and flying from London to New York in half the time of a conventional airliner, the Concorde was a technological marvel.

I was lucky enough to fly Concorde twice, and watching the curvature of the earth’s service, combined with the slight kick as it tore through the Mach 2 barrier, was awesome.

I even flew it from Paris to go to lunch in Marrakech – but that’s another story.

But economics and fuel prices, as well as environmental concerns and a fatal crash in Paris in July 2000, meant the delta-winged marvel was withdrawn from service in 2003.

If you wanted speed at ground level then, you had to turn to France, where state-owned SNCF introduced in 1981 the Train a Grand Vitesse, or High-Speed Train, capable of moving at up to 570 km/h. That network now covers most of France’s major cities.

In 2007, China introduced its own high-speed rail system, which is now the most heavily used anywhere in the world, with 1.44 billion passengers carried last year. The longest line is 2,298 km, from Guangzhou in the south to the capital, Beijing.

And, to bring us back to high technology, there is the world’s only maglev line, which is in Shanghai and is capable of hitting 431 km/h.

Maglev means trains gliding above a track by means of magnetic repulsion, and power by a linear motor.

Frankly, the idea of a maglev train powering its way through an underwater tube at a theoretical speed of 2,000 km/h seems fantastical to me.But if anyone can do it, then Chinese technological innovation can. Watch this space.

在意识到速度从来都是人类不懈追求的目标之前，一条“中国科学家正尝试研制能够穿越海底隧道，最高时速可达2000公里的磁悬浮列车”的新闻真让我大跌眼镜。

我居住在伦敦东南部，附近是Sydenham Woods森林，算得上是 Great South Wood森林残留的最后一片树林，GreatSouth Wood森林在中世纪覆盖着大部分的伦敦周边各郡。

隐藏在矮树丛中的是一次意义非凡的实验后留下的遗迹，这项实验由颇具事业心的铁路工程师兼发明家托马斯•韦伯斯特•拉梅尔（Thomas Webster Rammell）发起。

1864年，托马斯不满当时蒸汽火车速度太慢，车厢太拥挤，环境太肮脏，便想到了一个主意：用压缩空气为火车提供动力，即乘客坐在开放式车厢内穿过相对密封的隧道从A地到B地。

目前为止，一切都令人满意。托马斯已试验过气动火车（Pneumatic-powered train），用真空驱动的铁路货车为伦敦气动运输公司送信。

而有一点似乎没有考虑到，那就是这样的交通方式会对乘客产生怎样的影响。

想象一下，这趟列车由一节节装饰着一圈猪鬃的车厢组成，里面载满着倒霉的乘客，列车被快速吸入密不透气的隧道里。气动火车只运营了两个多月，但人们认为，对连接泰晤士河南岸的滑铁卢和伦敦中央白厅的长期线路来说，它已是一条十分良好的模范线路。

铁路建设开始了，但一直没有完工。直到今天，当地人还在谈论着鼓膜破裂的乘客，关于鬼魂的谣言也不绝于耳。1930年，一位当地妇女甚至声称曾看到过一辆满载着身穿维多利亚时代服装的骷髅的老铁路货车。当然，这从未得到证实。枕木和部分隧道至今仍然存在。

此后，人们对交通工具速度的狂热追求就暂时告一段落。

转眼间到了1976年，英法联合研制的“协和号”超音速客机开始在英国航空公司和法国航空公司投入使用。

它的速度高达2.04马赫，是音速的两倍，只需传统客机一半的时间便可从伦敦飞至纽约。协和飞机堪称是一个技术奇迹。

我有幸乘坐过协和飞机两次，你可以欣赏到地球的曲率，在飞机速度超过临界点2马赫时感受机身轻微的震荡，那种体验真是太棒了。

我甚至曾乘坐协和飞机从巴黎飞到马拉喀什去吃午餐——当然那是另一次经历了。

但经济状况、燃油价格、环境问题以及2000年7月发生在巴黎的致命航空事故等一系列原因导致这个三角翼奇迹从2003年开始停用。

如果你追求的是火车的速度，那么我们就必须从法国开始讲起。1981年，法国国营铁路公司（SNCF）推出了一辆大维特斯列车（Grand Vitesse），即高速列车，时速可达570公里。现在，这种列车网络覆盖了法国的大部分主要城市。

2007年，中国推出了自己的高铁系统，也是目前世界上使用最频繁的高铁系统。2016年客运量达14.4亿人次。最长线路北起首都北京，南到广州，全程2298公里。

现在我们再回到技术层面来看。上海拥有世界上唯一一条投入商业运营的磁悬浮线路，速度可达431公里/小时。

磁悬浮意味着通过电磁排斥力实现列车与轨道之间的无接触的悬浮和导向，再利用直线电机产生的电磁力牵引列车运行。

坦率地说，磁悬浮列车以2000公里/小时的理论速度穿越海底隧道这一想法对我来说似乎是异想天开。但是如果有人能做到，那么就是中国的技术创新能实现这一梦想，就让我们拭目以待吧。