August 7, 2015
Hatten-Munderloh, Germany: The day of the maglev
I SLIPPED out of the campsite at six. Holland was still asleep.
It took a while to get out of Valthermond. Unlike most communities, which grow up around a crossroads or a river crossing, Valthermond stretched itself out along a canal. This and similar towns are what the Dutch call lint communities, lint being a length of tape. The tape round your handlebars, for instance, is stuurlint.
From side to side, there's not much to the place. But from one end to the other lengthways is a dozen kilometres. My campground was already five kilometres from the sign welcoming me to town and so I still had another seven to go.
My chicken friend, with the long, lean, bespectacled face of a doctor, used his beside manner last night. He comforted me that it was only seven kilometres to the German border.
"You see those wind turbines over there?" he asked. "Well, they're in Germany."
Well, they weren't. And since I had seven kilometres simply to clear Valthermond, his estimate was neither along the road nor in a straight line.
I rode on and on, past houses with ringing alarming clocks, past sleepy men making tea and past a closed hairdresser's which promised modern cuts and professional care to all customers. Once they'd woken up.
A light duvet of mist had tucked Holland in for the night. The wind turbines came and went, and then a canal bridge with a flurry of trafic. A short bike path with a warning that angry birds were attacking passers-by. And finally, without announcement, the land of the economic miracle.
You don't expect the countryside to change just because politicians have drawn a border. It's as flat here as back on the other side. But it's emptier, duller. The fields are larger and for the most part full of maize.
There were pleasing touches, like the bike racks beside bus stops. But today had little to bring melody to the heart.
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Except that I passed under a long, high and surprisingly narrow bridge. I'd seen bridges like that before and they turned out to be a water supply graced by engineering novelty. But the land was flat. It's not impossible, obviously, to make a long bridge lower at one end than the other so that the water flows, but something seemed wrong.
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And then I realised this was no aqueduct. It was the test track for maglev trains. You know the story? Back in the 1960s someone said that if you put a magnet under a train, and another on the ground, they'd force each other apart and the train would float. No need for rails. Then somehow you changed the magnetic force so that the train would accelerate or brake. It would all be terribly space age.
DB, the German railway company, got excited and here in northern Germany the scientists built a test track. That's what I rode under this morning. I remembered it was here somewhere but my geography of Germany is sketchy and it came as a surprise.
I suppose something must have gone wrong. I remember reading that the project had been abandoned but I don't remember why.
It impressed me how long the track was. Silly, really, because it's bound to have been pretty long for a train that would run at 500kmh. I kept riding under or beside it for much of the morning, until finally it turned gently out of sight. It seems a shame things didn't work out, although haven't they got a maglev train in Japan these days?
Tomorrow I'm going to Bremen. I'm looking forward to that, although I worry that it'll be a long haul through docks and industrial estates.
Today's ride: 125 km (78 miles)
Total: 3,445 km (2,139 miles)
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