BBC News and The Daily Telegraph wrote earlier this week about the French engineering giant Alstom who has unveiled a new high-speed train. The AGV (Automotrice Grande Vitesse) train will travel at up to 360km/h (224mph), powered by engines placed under each carriage.

Alstom compares the AGV – successor to the TGV – to the world’s largest passenger plane, the Airbus A380 plane, in terms of importance and innovation. The capacity will be increased from 485 to 650 passengers, and at the same time reduce energy consumption by 15 percent. The train will also make less noise.

The first trains will hit the rails in Italy in 2011 and in France around 2014.

Faster

Another story that caught my eyes last week was the exploratory plans for a ultrafast eco-friendly passenger jet.

With funding from the European Space Agency, a team of engineers and scientists has come up with the A2, a plane they believe could carry 300 passengers at a top speed of more than 6400km/h (3,000mph)!

Alan Bond, a senior engineer and managing director at the company, said the A2 could be operating within 25 years if there was demand for it.

The A2 is designed to leave Brussels international airport, fly quietly and subsonically out into the north Atlantic at mach 0.9 before reaching mach 5 across the North Pole and heading over the Pacific to Australia.

The flight time from Brussels to Australia, allowing for air traffic control, would be four hours 40 minutes. It sounds incredible by today’s standards but I don’t see why future generations can’t make day trips to Australasia.

The key to the design is the fuel it would use. Conventional fuels would not be able to get the A2 up to the necessary speed, and so Reaction Engines has designed an engine that would run on liquid hydrogen. A spin-off is that liquid hydrogen is potentially much greener than conventional fuel.

Another advantage of the design is that while the 132 metre-long A2 is much bigger than conventional jets it would be lighter than a Boeing 747 and could land on current airport runways.

More information is available at The Guardian.

The size of the ship, 450,000GT, 505m length, 58m breadth hull, 20 decks, was first determined as an adequate level as defined by the requirement to have the “functions of a city”.

The highest priority was the functionality of the vessel so the appearance of the ship is in no way eccentric, and remains orthodox.

Trial speed is 22kn, which is more or less standard, however if one considers the grand size of the ship, its speed is nothing but surprising.

The largest allocation of floor space on the ship is the multi-purpose hall. This awesome floor space of 7,000 square meters is essential for various kinds of events to be held. It is about 10 times bigger than any of the halls in the hotels, and is capable of holding any kind of trade show, convention, in-door sport event, etc.

Three different class hotels, each with 1,200 rooms.

The size of the shopping mall was something also not to be compromised. A spectacular 300m long, 16m wide, 18.4m high atrium, to hold about the same number of shops as in a department store.

The building has not yet started but with a solid investment team I can’t see any reason why this shouldn’t become a reality.

More info and specifications [Source: princesskaguya.com]

Update: Royal Caribbean have already ordered a 360m length, 73m heigh ship named Genesis which will be ready for launch in 2009. The massive vessel weighs 12 times the Eiffel tower and will have a capacity of 5400 passengers. Until Princess Kaguya sets “sail” it will be the worlds largest-ever cruise ship.

The project, approved last week by the regional government of Aragon, also calls for the construction of residential areas, an equestrian centre and a golf course on just over 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of land in the Los Monegros desert.

Tentatively called “Gran Escala,” which means large-scale, the development has a 17-billion-euro (25-billion-dollar) price tag that will be footed by International Leisure Development, a London-based consortium of investors.

Developers expect the complex will receive 25 million visitors per year when it is completed, below its maximum capacity of 35 million annual visitors.

The location — half-way between Madrid and Barcelona, Spain’s second city — was selected over two other possible sites in Europe because it has good transportation links, favourable tax laws and relatively low land prices.

Millions are being spent in the nearby city of Zaragoza to upgrade rail and air connections, and expand its small airport, in time for the 2008 World Fair which it will host.

Zaragoza is already connected to Madrid by a high-speed train that takes only 80 minutes to make the roughly 300-kilometre (185-mile) trip and by the time of the fair it will be linked by high-speed rail to Barcelona as well.

Sources: AFP, Times Online

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