For years, one of the big items of talk around the General Assembly in Harrisburg was Maglev. I hardly ever hear talk about it anymore, but it's still floating around...
Maglev Inc.'s proposed Pennsyl vania project has the very practical application of whisking folks from Pittsburgh International Airport to downtown Pittsburgh initially, to later run out to the suburbs of Monroeville and Greensburg.The longer-term vision is to extend the regional maglev system east to State College, Harrisburg and Philadelphia; west to Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago; north to Erie and Buffalo; and south to Morgantown and Charleston, and beyond.
While maglev projects have been proposed to link Baltimore and Washington and Atlanta and Chattanooga, they're merely on paper. The Maryland Legislature passed a law specifically prohibiting the state from spending any money on the study, development or constructions of a maglev system. As for the Atlanta-Chattanooga project, a decision has yet to be made whether to go with a maglev system or traditional steel wheel.
Pittsburgh's Maglev Inc., on the other hand, has been quietly developing the fabrication capacity necessary to build a ground-transportation system for the 21st century. And unlike other states where maglev systems have been proposed, Pennsylvania -- to its considerable credit -- has been financially supportive of maglev, which has proven particularly crucial over the last two years when federal maglev funding was nonexistent.
Maglev Inc. has not limited the scope of the advanced technology required to fabricate thousands of "individual and geometrically unique guiderail sections" on which the trains would run. It also has demonstrated its value in the construction of steel-hulled ships and girders for bridges.
Contracts with the Office of Naval Research for its stealth ship program have kept Maglev Inc. and its critical technology afloat.
The huge economic and employment potential of maglev also is reflected in the fact that Maglev's McKeesport facility is rapidly becoming a cutting edge industrial learning center where students from a growing number of institutions of higher education are coming to earn degrees in precision fabrication.