Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 13, 1990 TAG: 9003133202
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: ORLANDO, FLA. LENGTH: Long
The train would travel from the Orlando International Airport to an area of scrub pines near Orange County's sewage-treatment ponds. The 14-mile trip, ending near most of Orlando's top attractions including Disney World and Sea World, is supposed to take five minutes.
The German Transrapid "maglev" eventually would connect not only with airplanes, but with another modern form of land transportation that already blankets Europe: a 150-mph advanced passenger train linking Miami, Orlando and Tampa. That train, riding on traditional steel wheels resting firmly on steel rails, is the promise of another consortium of 29 companies dominated by a Swedish conglomerate, a Houston construction company and a Florida real-estate development firm.
After a decades-long love affair with the automobile and the airplane, Florida appears ready to take a step backward to the future, re-embracing the technology that first developed the state when Henry M. Flagler pushed his railroad south to Miami and beyond to Key West. "The railroad that went to sea" was an engineering feat deemed impossible until Flagler completed the project in 1912.
At the moment, Florida appears slightly ahead of California and Nevada, where the California-Nevada Super Speed Ground Transportation Commission has announced plans to break ground in 1993 for a high-speed train linking Southern California and Las Vegas. The Texas High Speed Rail Authority board met for the first time Jan. 25, with a German-backed group and a French-American consortium already competing to build a Dallas-Houston high-speed line.
High-speed rail lines are also at the talking stage in Ohio and a handful of other states.
"The right elements are in place for the high-speed rail issue to gain momentum in crowded corridors where cities are between 300 and 600 miles apart," said Joseph Vranich, Washington director of the High Speed Rail Association, a group of businesses, governments and individuals supporting high-speed rail transportation. "We have gridlock on our highways and winglock at our airports which is causing great irritation to many."
Skeptics abound. Some projects have been delayed or killed by political squabbles, and others face major financing problems. There is still the question of whether Americans will ride in sufficient numbers to make such lines pay off. But with a strong push from banks and corporations in Japan and Western Europe - now joined by Bechtel, Morrison Knudsen and other major U.S. construction firms - it appears that maglev and high-speed rail will be given a chance to succeed or fail in a country where the passenger train is a bit player except in Amtrak's Washington-New York corridor.
The technology involved in the high-speed trains is not new. The first of the new generation of electrically powered bullet trains made its first trip between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964, and Japan operates 1,249 miles of high-speed line. The 186-mph French Train a Grande Vitesse (TGV) has operated for years on lines radiating from Paris, and a quieter, smoother, second-generation TGV has just been introduced. The German Intercity Express (ICE) is scheduled to begin service in 1991.
These steel-wheel-on-steel-rail trains supplement an already fast and convenient rail service throughout Europe.
The train chosen for the Miami-Orlando-Tampa train is the 150-mph Swedish Fastrain, built by Asea Brown Boveri, which also supplied the electric locomotives for Amtrak's Washington-New York Northeast corridor, the U.S. version of high-speed rail where trains sprint between stations at speeds up to 125 mph.
Even magnetic-levitation technology is not new, although it has never been tried in daily revenue passenger service.
It was Americans who invented the concept of levitating a vehicle above a guideway with powerful superconducting magnets, then using magnetic force to propel it at high speeds. James Powell and Gordon Danby of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York patented a superconducting vehicle in 1968, and research continued for the next seven years at the Stanford Research Institute, Ford Motor Co., General Motors, Rohr Corp., Boeing Aerospace and other companies and universities.
But the U.S. maglev effort came to an abrupt halt in 1974 and 1975 when the Nixon and Ford administrations cut all Federal Railroad Administration subsidies for it from the federal budget.
Because of political problems in Germany and technical difficulties in Japan, neither country has built a passenger-carrying maglev system to test whether passengers will accept the system and to determine what problems may develop in constant daily operation. That means that the first true demonstration project is likely to be in Orlando.
"If we fail, other projects will have such difficulty; they will be set back 10 or 15 years," said K. Sam Tabuchi, president of Maglev Transit Inc., a consortium that is dominated by Japanese banks and Japanese and German corporations.
Tabuchi said his group estimates the project will cost $600 million to $800 million and will haul 2.5 million passengers a year, 35 to 40 percent of them "joy riders" who would include the maglev as another attraction on their visits to central Florida. At that rate, the project would make money, he said.
The terminal is to be centrally located, about three miles from Disney World and close to other attractions near International Drive, such as Sea World, Universal Studios, Wet and Wild and the Outlet Mall. International Drive is to be extended past the planned new station - now an undeveloped field near the Orange County Percolate Ponds - with buses or perhaps people-movers shuttling passengers to all the attractions in the area.
For high-speed rail backers, real-estate development will be the financial engine that drives the Miami-Orlando-Tampa train.
The consortium building the line - including Asea, CRS Sirrine Inc. of Houston and AmeriFirst Development Corp. of Florida - plans on receiving exclusive development rights along the tracks in exchange for building the line. The group envisions a $25 billion string of developments that together would be the largest in Florida history.
Construction funding depends on a complicated set of financing mechanisms that include a plan essentially allowing the consortium to use the expected increase in land values and property-tax income as collateral for loans (although local jurisdictions, not the consortium, actually benefit from the higher tax receipts). Shearson Lehman Hutton has estimated that the expected $10 billion or more in real-estate development income would more than pay off the expected $7 billion cost of the rail system, including construction, rolling stock, debt service and operating losses.
by CNB