Earlier this week German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to China. As always happens in these kinds of visits, a raft of commercial deals was signed. Among these was one for Germany and China to collaborate on the building of a second high-speed, magnetic-levitation train system.


No, it's not science fiction. As anyone who has flown into Shanghai's Pudong International Airport knows, Shanghai already has the world's first--and only--commercial magnetic-levitation (mag-lev) train, built in cooperation with Germany's Siemens and a few other companies. This train whisks you at a glass-smooth 350kmph from the airport to, um, the outskirts of town. Unfortunately running it to the center of town would have been prohibitively expensive, so you still need to take a taxi the rest of the way.

This is a shame because ideally the train would have run all the way into the showpiece, commercial new town in Pudong (the skyline you see in every photograph of Shanghai), then under the Huangpu River to stop at Shanghai's commercial center of Nanjing Road, in Puxi (which is still where most of Shanghai is). Then, for good measure, it would have continued all the way out to Shanghai's second airport, Hongqiao, which is the one I use most of the time. That would have made the mag-lev truly useful.

But this would have cost way more money than there was. So the line remains gorgeous, sleek and essentially unfinished. Tickets are also expensive, so it tends to run below capacity a lot of the time.

All of this isn't stopping the Chinese Government from pushing ahead with a second mag-lev train line, however, also in collaboration with the Germans. This one, recently unveiled and revisited during Chancellor Merkel's visit, will run from Shanghai to the city of Hangzhou, about 200km away. It will be able to run at a walloping 500kmph (take that, Shinkansen!), and is meant to be an alternative to flying. (Although, in a sense, it is flying.)

The spacious and fast mag-lev would certainly make a comfortable alternative to airplanes, especially if the planners follow the lesson of China's traditional train system and put the stations in the center of town. As any veteran of China's air travel system will tell you, the trains have their advantages.

But it will be expensive. Up to 4 billion euros, reports say. And that's before the inevitable problems. According to Wikipedia, it costs 930 million euros to build the current line, which is only 30km long. And that number may not be accurate. Henry Blodget has already criticized its finances. Will the new line prove worth the investment? Four large in euros would pay for a lot of airport improvements and several Boeing 737s. But no 737 will ever be as cool as this train, or catch the world's attention in the same way. And I hear Hangzhou is a great town...