The missing Linimo photos
Wed 22 Aug 07 01:38 | Tags: Hardware, Japan
Way the heck back in March, I wrote an article entitled "Riding the Linimo: The train tech of tomorrow." It was about my experience on the Linimo, a maglev train line near the city of Nagoya, Japan. At the time, I lamented the fact that the photos I had taken had fallen into a digital black hole, never to be seen again… It turns out that they, along with almost all my other photos in Japan, were actually safe and cozy on the hard drive inside my old, dead laptop. When I recently bought a 2.5-inch drive enclosure and put my laptop drive in it to use as a back-up drive, I was more than a little pleased to rediscover those pictures, tucked away and patiently waiting for me to find them. Please allow me to share them with you here. (But be sure to go back and read the original article first, if you haven't already.)
Click on the thumbnails for larger images. The images have been downscaled somewhat for faster downloading. If you're a train nerd and want some higher-res versions of these photos, just let me know and I'll pass 'em on to you.
Here's a train pulling into the station. Note that the rails are elevated quite high above the ground, so the stations are often more vertical than horizontal; you buy your ticket on the ground floor, then take the stairs or elevator to the tracks up above. It's kind of backwards from how a subway works.
Now the train is pulling out of the station. The Ferris wheel in the background is a left-over from the 2005 World's Fair, which the line was built to service.
The entrance to one of the stations, and a ticket vending area. The chart on the right shows the prices for a ticket to the various stations. Each station is badged with a symbol colored in boring grey and some other color - rather ugly, in my opinion.
A close-up of the tracks, such as they are, and a shot of the tracks going off into the distance. (Note that it had been raining recently.) If I hadn't known better, I would have had a hard time identifying them as train tracks; they're flat like boards. Very strange.
Finally, a shot of the interior of a very empty station. As I said in the original article, everything looks very new and modern compared to older stations, for obvious reasons. The bright lighting is also a welcome change from your standard subway station.
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My tiny Japanese apartment
Fri 6 Apr 07 12:25 | Tags: Japan
Okay, this is cool. Remember a while back when I linked to A Very Short Walk Around A Tokyo Apartment, and mentioned that it was very much like the apartment I had in Nagoya? Well, I managed to come across some digital pictures I had stored on a USB drive, and some pictures of my apartment were included therein. Let's take a look at them, shall we? The images are all thumbnailed; click on them for a larger view.
This is the apartment building from the outside. It's fairly nondescript for a Japanese apartment building; when I first moved in there, I sometimes had a hard time finding the building among its neighbors, especially at night when I couldn't tell the color so well. My apartment would be the right-most apartment on the third story.
This is a shot of the kitchen area. The front door is the green door and tiled area to the back. Note I only had one burner, which made it difficult to cook some things, and that it was electric; if I wanted to cook something with the lights on, I could not use any other major electrical devices (such as the TV) without tripping a breaker. Eventually I bought a small gas burner that used gas canisters and used that for cooking instead; it worked much better. My small washing machine is barely visible in the lower-left; not being able to read the Japanese buttons, I had to figure out how to use it by trial-and-error. The bathroom would be off to the right.
And here it is. Note the deep bath tub and the combined shower/sink fixture. There's no toilet in this room; like in the Tokyo apartment, that was in a separate room (and also like that apartment, it had its own little sink above the tank). Note my imported personal goods; Crest toothpaste and Speed Stick deodorant. Japanese deodorant is notoriously ineffective for smelly westerners, and at this point I did not know enough Japanese to know a tube of toothpaste from a tube of hemorrhoid ointment, so I was relying on stuff I brought from home.
Here's a shot from inside the main room, towards the front door/hallway. That's my futon up there on the top; during the summer, I had to move the futon down to the floor and sleep there, because it just got too friggin' hot up there. On the other hand, once winter set in again, the difference between the loft level and the floor level was the difference between being merely uncomfortably cold and "Dear God, my fingers and toes are turning purple." The bottles beneath the mirror are soda and juice bottles, waiting for me to remember to take them to the corner on recycling day. Having limited shelf space and not being able to make pinholes in the wall, I stored magazines and important papers on twine tied between my bed and a light fixture; that's what you're seeing on the left there. It was effective and made for a cheapo dorm-roomy decoration as well.
And here's a shot from the hallway, looking out. Here it's most clear that this apartment wasn't very big, but I managed to do just fine since I didn't have very many things anyway. My window was curtainless; I had to fix that when the summer came on and the scorching sun burned the place up. Some clothes are drying on twine outside the window there. The floor looks like hardwood, but actually it was a linoleum-type covering made to look like wooden boards. My combo heater and air conditioner is barely visible at the top of the image; another appliance I had to learn to use by trial and error.
So there you have it; my cozy, tiny Japanese apartment. Not a bad place to live, all in all. Now if I could only recover those pictures of the Linimo that I lost…
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Riding the Linimo: The train tech of tomorrow
Mon 26 Mar 07 04:16 | Tags: Hardware, Japan
In the spring and summer of 2005, the Japanese prefecture of Aichi was home to Expo 2005, the World's Fair for that year. The fair's theme was "nature's wisdom," or, more explicitly, the use of new technological advances to reduce the environmental impact of current industries. The choice for this as a theme was likely inspired by the fact that Aichi is an industrial heart of Japan, as the home of the Toyota car company and other industries; the fact that "Aichi" can (incorrectly) be written using the characters 愛 ai, "love," and 地 chi, "Earth," may have been a factor as well. Ironically, a large area of forest and grasslands had to be cleared and paved over to accommodate the fairgrounds, to the chagrin of Japanese environmental groups…
The Linimo hovers eight millimeters above its specially-designed tracks. (image source)
A new train line needed to be built to connect the nearby major city of Nagoya with the fairgrounds. In keeping with the environmental theme, the new line utilized magnetic levitation. As the name implies, magnetic levitaiton, or maglev, is a technology by which electromagnets are used to levitate the train above the track and propel it. This means that no part of the moving train is in contact with the stationary track, effectively eliminating the effect of friction between the wheels and the track on a traditional train. Without this friction, maglev trains are much more efficient and capable of higher speeds than traditional trains.
Take, for example, the Shanghai Maglev Train. This was the first commercial high-speed maglev train, opening on New Year's Day in 2004. This two-station line connects Shanghai's subway system with Pudong International Airport, with 19 miles (30.5 km) of track. It can cover that length in under eight minutes, achieving a top speed of 268 MPH (431 km/h) during normal operation.
However, back in Aichi, the designs for the new maglev train line were a bit more modest. Dubbed the Linimo (リニモ), this train line could be considered more of a maglev interpretation of a low-speed metro system instead of a high-speed system Shanghai needed. The line's western terminus is Fujigaoka Station, which is also the eastern terminus of one of Nagoya's major subway lines. From there it makes stops at four new, fairly small stations in the sparsely-populated area of eastern Aichi before reaching the edge of the fairgrounds. It traces the fairgrounds for three more stations before stopping abruptly at its eastern terminus, near the eastern edge of the grounds; that's nine stations in total. The train achieves the more meager top speed of 62 MPH (100 km/h).
During the period of the Expo, which saw larger than expected attendance figures, the Linimo system, being the only train link between Nagoya and the fairgrounds, saw very heavy traffic; at times the train was packed so full that it was unable to fully levitate, and some riders had to be asked to get off and wait for the next train to come. After the Expo ended, the line was kept in operation to serve the people who lived in the area.
I lived in Nagoya from the spring of 2005 to the spring of 2006. As I was quite busy, poor and confused when I first came to Japan, I did not attend the Expo while it was open; and I had little other reason to venture east of my home area of Chikusa ward; all of the major shopping, entertainment and work areas are in the western part of the prefecture. However, as it became apparent that I would be coming back home in April of 2006, I decided the Linimo line was something I should check out before I left; so I rode it for its entire length and back, and took lots of pictures along the way. Those pictures, like others I took of my stay in Japan, have fallen into a digital void, but you can check out lots of pictures taken by others on the Linimo page at Wikimedia Commons.(UPDATE: I've since found the pictures; check 'em out here.)
I boarded the train at the Fujigaoka station, the western terminal. The trains, as well as all of the stations besides the Fujigaoka one, are noticeably clean and new, as is to be expected; one can tell that they've seen less of the wear and tear of being packed with millions of daily commuters as the older trains and stations have. (The Fujigaoka station is an exception because, as I mentioned above, it was a pre-existing terminus for the Nagoya subway system.)
Interestingly, I noticed that there was not a conductor for the trains. There is a little area with controls presumably for piloting the train, but I was quite surprised to see the doors close and the train take off without a conductor climbing in and taking their position in this area. It turns out that the trains are unmanned; apparently there's a crew member at each station that monitors the platforms of the station via cameras and controls the opening and closing of the train doors and the taking-off of the train from there. The train otherwise accelerates and decelerates by itself.
So how does it ride? As you might expect, it's quite a bit quieter than a standard train; no click-clack, click-clack of the train wheels as it rolls over seams in the tracks, no loud skreeee from the brakes as the train slows down to take a curve or enter a station. There was less crowd noise as well; as I mentioned, eastern Aichi is sparsely populated, so few people use the line now that the Expo is over, and I was also there fairly early in the day on a Sunday as well -- not typically prime time for train line traffic. At times, I was the only passenger in my car or in the stations. (I've heard the low traffic for the line means that the Linimo is no longer financially solvent, but I don't know if that's true; the line is still open, anyway.) The train "feels" slower than other passenger trains, but I suspect part of the reason for that is that the stations are fairly close together; the train can't spend much time at top speed before it has to start decelerating for the next station. The experience is actually a little bit underwhelming for something that is definitely a major milestone in the implementation of next-generation train technology if you take it at face value… But maybe someone who is more of a "train nerd" would get into it more.
So what's next for maglev trains? There are various proposed maglev lines around the world in various stages of design and construction. Not to be showed up by Japan's maglev appearance in their Expo, Shanghai is actually building a second high-speed line to coincide with the Expo 2010, which they will host. There are some significant obstacles to their adoption, however; mostly stemming from the fact that maglev and traditional trains cannot use the same tracks. This is why all major maglev projects past and present are entirely new train lines instead of replacement of traditional lines; the cost and inconvenience of stopping train service on a line already in operation in order to replace the traditional tracks with maglev tracks is prohibitive.
Still, research and development in the field continues. The major limiting factors to the efficiency of a standard train are friction with the track and air resistance; with the track friction gone with maglev trains, some have speculated that the air resistance factor could be mitigated by placing the train in an airtight tube and removing some of the air, creating a partial vacuum. Under these conditions, with air resistance minimized, maglev trains should be able to break the sound barrier; 770 MPH (1238 km/h). Of course, there are safety issues with this; if a hole is made in the hull of the train, would all the air escape and cause everyone on board to suffocate?
Maglev trains are slowly turning from theoretical futuristic technology to a contemporary method of daily transportation. By any chance if you find yourself in central Japan and want to see tomorrow's train tech in action, head over to Nagoya and give the Linimo a ride. I'd be lying if I said it was exciting, but it certainly is interesting. (Be sure to have some tebasaki as well.)
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