The Train You're Never Late For

#06: The Train You're Never Late For
By PETER RICHMOND

Photograph by Julius Rooymans

Doug Malewicki envisions a future full of unusual things. Like a way of liberating American cities from their clogged-artery highways using a lacework of elevated rails that would carry thousands of commuters in individual pods coasting silently above the sidewalks at 100 miles per hour. Like a 40-foot-high robotic dinosaur that eats cars and spits fire to thrill crowds of carnival spectators. Malewicki has already designed the latter, but while his Robosaurus will be chewing Chevy Novas throughout the land this summer, the only way to see his magnetic-levitation-powered SkyTran is to pore over the snappy retrofuturistic illustrations on its Web site (www.skytran.net). Malewicki and the rest of his team at Skytran Inc. -- a half-dozen staff members scattered from Raleigh, N.C., to Seattle -- are fully convinced that once a full-size prototype is up and running, it's only a theoretical hop, step and jump to the day when the beleaguered American worker will walk to his local pod station (at a shopping mall on Main Street), wave a personal ID in front of a sensor and be whisked away in his fiberglass cocoon. Picture the offspring of a Newark Airport monorail and a Killington chairlift, and you can envision SkyTran's commuting machine: no straphanging with strangers, no carpooling with verbose neighbors. Just a personal zoom with a view.
"There are a lot of people saying, 'You're pie in the sky,' "says Malewicki, 61, who has a master's degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Stanford University. "No. This is just engineering. People are good at saying, 'When the time is right.' Well, the time is right."

It may be right, but it hasn't arrived, and with no money yet in place, there's no assurance that it ever will. It's one thing to have Ralph Nader touting SkyTran on the Green Party campaign trail, or to have transportation officials from Seoul to El Paso exploring SkyTran's potential to relieve their urban woes. It's quite another to get the thing off the ground, so to speak -- especially considering the inventor's belief that the financial backing ought to come from the private sector. Malewicki's last stint of gainful employment -- as "a senior technical specialist in advanced composites manufacturing" on the B-2-bomber project -- soured him on governmental red tape.
On paper, SkyTran does take on a certain fanciful patina -- like, say, that of a musty back issue of Popular Mechanics with "the Diesel-Powered Flying Bicycles of the Future" on the cover. But SkyTran makes use of solid physics: specifically magnetic levitation, which has been in development for years for trains. Engineers have been betting that a train with magnets built into its carriage can float along a hollow guideway. But where most mag-lev systems need electromagnets or superconductors powered by an outside source, Malewicki's SkyTran relies on a pioneering, pollution-free mag-lev system called Inductrack. Developed by a Lawrence Livermore Laboratories scientist named Richard F. Post, Inductrack needs nothing but simple magnets, and in Malewicki's scheme they'd be mounted in the carriage of the people pods. As the carriage passed above two kinds of wire coils embedded in the guideway below, the resultant electric fields would create a levitation force that would keep the thing aloft and a propulsion force that would keep it moving forward.
A small jolt of electricity would be required to start each pod, which would be obediently awaiting its passenger in the pod station down on a second guideway beneath the main "superhighway" guideway. Assuming the cost of gas at $1.50 a gallon and a kilowatt-hour of electricity at 10 cents, SkyTran's chief marketer, Robert Cotter, claims that SkyTran could move thousands of pods along a rail designed to hold six lanes' worth of automobile volume at 300-miles-per-gallon efficiency -- in theory, anyway.
Cotter, for one, has believed in Malewicki's theories for years. The two first crossed paths in 1979, when Cotter was the vice president of the International Human Powered Vehicle Association and Malewicki entered his Mini Micro Missile, driven by his 8-year-old daughter, in an I.H.P.V.A. competition. She averaged 29 miles per hour that day, the world's fastest self-propelled kid.
In the end, even if SkyTran suffers the fate of another of Malewicki's inventions, the manned flying kite cycle, give the SkyTran team its due: while beltways continue to bigfoot our last few acres of exurbia and choke our cities into submission, SkyTran is looking up, and ahead.

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June 11, 2000

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