Shanghai Maglev

From the Bund we decided to go and ride the Maglev to Pudong airport. We figured it would be less hassle to do so without our luggage. The Maglev runs from Longyang Rd. station (it intersects lines 2 & 7) in the east of Shanghai and takes only 8 minutes to get to the airport outside of the city. It's currently the fastest public train in the world which is why we had decided to ride it out, only to ride it back again. In other social circles this is referred to as being a nerd.

Getting to the Maglev station turned out to be a bit of a mare. Having shown our driver on the map where we wanted to go and giving the international body language sign for fast train (think doing the Locomotion on Speed) he headed off and 40 minutes later had dropped us off at Shanghai's main train station instead of the one we'd pointed to. The crowds for taxis were too long to immediately jump another.

Beijing Main Rail Station...not where we needed to be.

So we took the metro from this station to the proper station ourselves and when we got to the station found all the lights out and the shutters down, which caused some verbal sewage to be vented. Fortunately they were just saving electricity, or hadn't paid the bills. The station was still open and we were able to buy our return ticket for about 80 yuan.

As for the ride itself it was really really quick but not as quick as advertised. It's claimed to reach over 400km/h and can do the journey in 8 minutes. The latter part is true but at only 300km/h no faster than the bullet we took to Tianjin earlier in the trip. I can only guess they ran it at 400 to get the record then turned it down for commuters. Perhaps the posters should be reworded to read "capable of such and such a speed". Still it was a fun train ride and I was surprised at how much it banks, just like my first hydrofoil ride last year in Korea.

and you don't get any odd looks for leaving the train and getting straight back on either. I can only assume it's regular behaviour for what has become a popular, if geeky, tourist attraction.

I found a sales-pitchy youtube clip that shows the Maglev in action (at it's quoted max speed nonetheless). It has better footage than the out-of-the-window in the dark that I took.

We were by now both completely wrecked so decided to forego a trip to the worlds highest observation tower in the bottle opener building and headed back to the hotel to crash.