In meeting room G of San Diego’s Manchester Grand Hyatt, Neil Cummings was preaching yesterday to the choir—which in this case is the 20th International Conference on Magnetically Levitated Systems and Linear Drives.
“I call it the new Iron Horse,” said Cummings, referring to the maglev industry’s vision for high-speed trains driven by magnetic levitation technology. He invoked the name of Abraham Lincoln, “who was a railroad lawyer before the Civil War,” and reminded his audience that it took 50 years to get the transcontinental railroad built.
Ah, if only it was that easy.
As the president of the American Magline Group, Cummings heads a private consortium that wants to build a high-speed maglev train from Anaheim, CA (i.e. Disneyland) to Las Vegas, NV (i.e. casinos). The project proposed by the California-Nevada Super Speed Train Commission would adopt maglev technology used in China by Shanghai Transrapid, which moves passengers 19 miles between the Pudong International Airport and downtown Shanghai at speeds of roughly 220 mph.
Cummings argues that Maglev is a technology whose time has come, but he also concedes, “You can’t
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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