ABSTRACT
High-speed ground transportation, manifested by a new generation of wheel-on-rail and magnetically levitated trains (Maglev), is today seriously considered to fill a niche — in terms of travelling time, energy consumption, and environmental impact in the case of Maglev — between conventional wheel-on-rail trains and airplanes in the wide spectrum of modes of transportation. Significant effort has been put into research and development of high-speed ground transportation over more than twenty-five years in the past in many countries: Germany, Japan, and more recently the USSR19 and the U.S .14 For the U.S., R& D on Maglev represents a comeback after a long hiatus since the mid ’70s. Several feasibility studies to establish commercial lines have been carried out, many of them leading to positive recommendations.5 *Other countries, such as Switzerland10, also seriously consider Maglev as part of their expansion to high-speed transportation. In the present work, we study some of the technical aspects of high-speed
ground transportation systems. Even though the theme of our work centers specifically on high-speed vehicles, the results obtained are of a general nature, addressing a broader problem of dynamic interaction between moving loads and flexible structures.
