Although they rushed silently through countless public television documentaries in the 1970s, magnetic levitation trains always seemed to hover just out of reach.
"The concept has been around for years, and nobody -- not the Germans, the Japanese, or the Americans -- has managed to get it up commercially," said Jim Moore, spokesman for the Florida Overland Express, a conventional high-speed train system under development in Florida.
But maglevs will float closer to reality next month, when the Federal Railroad Administration begins short-listing proposals for a system that should start building somewhere in the United States by 2001. And new magnet technology may give the project an added lift.
The federal funding project began last summer, when the government authorized US$1 billion to help build a maglev line. Five projects will be short-listed to receive about $2 million apiece in seed money after the proposal period closes 15 February.
Of those, one will be chosen for development as the nation's first operational maglev railroad system.
Administration spokeswoman Pamela Barry said the administration expects the first segment of such a system to be completed around 2006. The new funding has resuscitated languishing maglev projects in Maryland, California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Fred Gurney has stood faithfully behind the maglev dream for several years, even after funding pledged by the government nine years ago was never actually appropriated for use.
"We've believed in this project for years, and now we finally have a broad political backing, and a population that isn't as mystified by the technology," said Gurney, who is president and CEO of Maglev Inc., a company seeking to build a maglev line from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.
Maglev trains operate under the ancient principal of physics that the opposite poles of two magnets attract and similar poles repel. In 1968, an American team was granted a patent for a maglev design. But when federal funding dried up in 1975, Japan and Germany leaped ahead in their maglev projects.
