Rich,

This was coming from American MagLev, General Atomics, and the Port of Los Angeles. UP has privately expressed little interest in this concept. The railroads privately consider the whole scheme laughable. It involves a four mile MagLev connector from one of the on-dock facilities at the Port to the ICTF in Long Beach. This is one of the "visionary" ideas of Mark Pisano, former Executive Director of the regional planning agency, who came up with this scheme to prop up is equally incredulous idea for a $20 billion regional passenger MagLev system between LAX and Ontario airports.

The transloading of containers onto the single deck Maglev "train" (although it isn't trainable?) will occur on one of the six or eight o on-dock facilities, then the MagLev will transport the containers (20 maximum at a time)at "200 mph" all of four miles to the ICTF and then unload the containers and reload them on double stack container trains up the Alameda Corridor. In addition to unnecessary loading and unloading (we're already doing on-dock loading of double stacks at most of the on-dock terminals), the Canadian Academy of Sciences study showed nearly 20 years ago that MagLev would use over 20 times as much energy to "levitate" the cargo.

The Port is under significant pressure to clean up ports related air pollution and this is one of the goofier ideas that they have agreed to study. Since MagLev use electric propulsion, this has been pushed as a panacea for eliminating truck and train emissions. Needless to say, some of the utilities, who are ironically telling us to save power, are interested in this scheme to sell electricity, too.