Solar FREAKIN' Roadways!

How Maglev Trains Work If you'v­e been to an airport lately, you've probably noticed that air travel is becoming increasingly congested. Despite frequent delays, airplanes still provide the fastest way to travel hundreds or thousands of miles. Passenger air travel revolutionized the transportation industry in the last century, letting people traverse great distances in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks. The only alternatives to airplanes -- feet, cars, buses, boats and conventional trains -- are just too slow for today's fast-paced society. A few countries are using powerful electromagnets to develop high-speed trains, called maglev trains. Electromagnetic Suspension (EMS) ­If you've ever played with magnets, you know that opposite poles attract and like poles repel each other. The magnetic field created in this wire-and-battery experiment is the simple idea behind a maglev train rail system. In the next section, we'll take a closer look at the Maglev track.