Maglev leaving station Maglev coming into station


I intend to do quite a few posts on our recent trip to China. So to get the ball rolling here is an account of our last major event there, the train journey to Putong International Airport. It doesn’t sound like much until I tell you that it was by Maglev. They say this is the only fully operational Maglev train in the world. It must have cost China very big bickies, but not to worry, they are dead set on showing the world that they are going to be World Number One (WNO) in everything. The station structure is very modernistic and there is a smooth flow through from taxi to platform. Tickets only cost 40RMB, about $8 Oz. Our train soon arrived, as there is one every 20 minutes. It accelerated smoothly for 4 minutes, by which time it reached a speed of 431 kph. It then immediately began to decelerate. At 300 kph it felt quite slow, until we looked out the window at the nearby roadway. After a total of 8 minutes we arrived at the airport. After some lunch we boarded our aircraft without any drama – except for the scissors incident. The x-ray picked a tiny pair of foldup scissors in Renee’s bag. So tiny that physically finding them took some time, including further X-raying. A matter of some interest is that no other X-ray had picked them (or should this be it) up.