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Guideways:
MAGLEV 2000 guideways will be prefabricated in factories at or
near the construction site to provide standardization and reduced
production costs. For high-speed travel, the predominant type
is an elevated narrow beam or "monorail" guideway,
a box girder structure measuring approximately 4 X 5 feet and
72 feet in length. In most cases, the supporting columns would
probably be poured in place, but a significant portion of these
could also be prefabricated. Normal height would be 17-22 ft
above the right-of-way grade although the guideway can be built
at-grade where safety and security permit. The footings for the
supporting columns occupy a small space, thus reducing environmental
disruption, whether in natural surroundings or already built
up areas.
The second type of guideway is the planar configuration in
which the coil panels are laid on a flat guideway structure.
This allows MAGLEV 2000 vehicles to switch onto or off from the
main narrow beam guideway without the need for any moving components.
High-speed electronic switching on the planar guideway enables
vehicles to stop at off-line stations without slowing traffic
on the system's main line. Using electronic switching and skip-stop
scheduling, MAGLEV 2000 vehicles can efficiently serve a wide
network of many distributed stations without sacrificing short
travel times. This feature is essential to attracting a large
ridership for a public transit system.
Switching:
The M-2000 vehicles travel on the narrow beam guideway over
most of the route, except when the vehicles switch off the main
guideway. The vehicle then transitions to the planar guideway,
which has two lines of independent loops. Depending on which
line of loops is active, the vehicle will either proceed along
the main guideway or switch to a secondary guideway that leads
to an off-line station. The switching process is carried out
at full speed, e.g., 300 mph.
Switching at high speeds allows high average vehicle speed, because
the vehicles do not have to slow down to switch off the guideway.
Moreover, high average speed is possible even if the distance
between maglev stations is short. The M-2000 vehicles employ
a "skip-stop" service, in which the vehicle bypasses
most of the stations on the route, only switching off line to
stop at scheduled stations.
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