Story: Speeding through Shanghai aboard China's Mag-Lev Train

There was a large hill near my childhood home in New England that everyone called The Coaster. It was a suburban street with very little traffic but it was well-used by the kids on my block who walked up and flew down that hill. Whether with a bike in the summer or a sled in the winter if you were on the Coaster you were going fast.

Even though we weren’t allowed to, my brother and I often snuck out of our yard to take our Big Wheels over to ride on that hill. Our lungs would be burning and our hearts pounding by the time we reached the top. Once there we’d mount our low three-wheelers for a non-stop express ride to the bottom, feet in the air, pedals spinning in a blur, the outside smells of the season punctuated with the waxy scent of warm plastic as the toy chassis beneath us reconciled physics that were beyond its design.

While we understood that cars went faster, there was no other experience at the age of seven that conveyed such a feeling of speed. The wind in our faces. The knowledge that there was no easy way to stop with a plastic handbrake that was barely effective at slow speeds. Sitting only inches off the ground with the moving texture of the pavement making it look like a static-filled TV screen. For many years the Coaster defined the concept of speed. I could conceive of nothing faster.

A few decades later it was with great interest that I went to check out Shanghai, China’s Magnetic Levitation train. Prior to seeing it I knew nothing about it except that it floats on a bed of magnets and it goes ludicrously fast. As I arrived at the low concrete tube of a station, I appreciated it immediately for its horizontality. So much of Shanghai’s landmarks are soaring glass and steel towers that rise majestically towards the heavens only to be thwarted by the city’s famously overcast and smoggy skies. It was nice to finally be able to survey something in its entirety.

Longyang Station is perhaps the cleanest and most well-kept train station I have ever experienced. Countries that lack massive amounts of cheap labor would perhaps not opt for snow white terrazzo floors. But the Chinese have employed white surfaces in the station with alacrity. Otherwise the design of the station was striking and modern. Reading the faces of the mostly Western passengers, one could surmise that the station was anywhere in Europe. If not for copious displays of cheap plastic flowers, the liberal use of red and gold banners, and a KFC on every platform, one would never suspect this station was located in the heart of Mainland China.

Ask the Chinese about their train and they will first tell you, adamantly and in excellent English, that the Japanese had nothing to do with it. They actually will cop to the fact that they brought in the Germans who know a thing or two about engineering great machines. But conspicuously missing from this admission is the true story of how Chinese spies in the middle of the night broke into the design and consulting offices used by the Germans and stole every design and technological secret they could.

Beginning its service in 2004, the train is apparently one of the only commercial “mag-lev” trains ever built. However, at a cost of ten billion Chinese Yuan (about $1.2 billion US dollars) it is an open question as to whether the train can truly be construed as commercial. It runs only 19 miles, from a part of downtown to the Pudong International Airport. If you were to make this journey by car it would take well over an hour. But at a speed of 431 kilometers per hour, the trip by train takes just over seven minutes.

The train is clearly about more than moving people between the city and the airport. Like so many other high-profile projects in China on the eve of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, the mag-lev train is also about “face” and China’s desire to be recognized as the aspirational world superpower that it probably already is. That such a technological marvel represents progress and success for China makes it easier to overlook the critics who have been vocal in their criticism of the train from the start. Its station is not exactly centrally located and favors a part of town that is populated largely with Western expats. Then there is the subject of the ticket cost. Round-trip fare is the equivalent of $10 US, well-beyond the budgets of most Chinese citizens in a nation where 700 million people live on less than $2 per day. Many alleged the project was a showy waste of government money without any real benefit to the people of China. The country more than lives up to its reputation for excelling at emulation. If it is superpower status they crave, the Chinese seem to be doing an excellent job of paralleling the taxpayer waste and inefficiencies of Western governments.

The day I rode the train it was filled with Americans and Europeans. The few Asian people on the train seemed to be tourists and tour guides. After a short wait on the empty platform the mag-lev train slid silently into view and disgorged its passengers before opening its doors for us. We were ushered onto the train, which was tastefully appointed and brightly lit. Everyone took their seats facing a Concorde-style digital display by which we could track the speed of our lightning-fast voyage to the airport and back. The overall cabin design was reminiscent of just about every other high-speed train I have ever been on, from France’s TVG to America’s Amtrak Acela. But as soon as the train began to move all other comparisons were inadequate.

Whereas other modes of fast transportation tend to accelerate quickly and then level off, Shanghai’s mag-lev train never seems to stop accelerating. The sensation was somewhat like a smoother, quieter jet take-off. But instead of an eventual departure from the ground you feel held to the earth with the force of a luge as if you were under the pull of a magnet yourself. The sense of speed was visceral, very much like my early Big Wheel experiences: at once steady and deliriously out of control.

The ride is smooth underneath you as the entire train floats on a cushion of the repelling force of opposed magnets, but the wind still constantly buffets the carriage from side to side. At first you can make out the Shanghai suburbs, with people on bicycles, squat hutongs and the ugly, skeletal infrastructure that supports the city. But as the train approaches 431 kilometers per hour, or nearly 270 miles per hour, the countryside spins by in a blur and the view out the window becomes akin to the feeling of opening your eyes under water.

You arrive at the airport almost before you left. We exited giddily and dashed to the other side of the platform for an immediate return trip, as if we were getting back in line at our favorite roller-coaster to repeat the feeling before the adrenaline evaporated from our blood streams. The sights were much of the same on the return trip, just a different side of the tracks. It was a future vision of farmland and slums, of people zipping around on overloaded motorbikes and cooking on open fires. Surprisingly, no one looked up at the train as it passed. They were either used to seeing it or unwilling to waste time considering something that was unimaginably beyond their means. Looking out from the inside the experience recalibrated for me a sensation of speed I had only known in childhood. I had finally found something faster.