The maglev - conventional rail debate

Have you noticed that as you grow older and wiser, you start to see problems in the logic of politicians and the media when they discuss important issues? Alan James of UK Ultraspeed is categoric that the German transrapid system will deliver advantages in virtually every area over conventional rail for high-speed lines yet for some reason, there are still people who are unconvinced. Of course, anyone can understand the risk of a wholesale change in something so large and important but I want to return to my initial point.
I have read various articles about why people legitimately think maglev is not to be preferred over conventional rail and here is where the problems are. Firstly, people compare the UK to Japan. In many ways we have similar issues, similar population densities and a love of trains except for one important detail: Japan has earthquakes and their maglev trains need a much greater distance between train and guideway in order to avoid serious damage in the event of an earthquake, generating strong magnetic fields over these great distances takes an enormous amount of power. Or the media compare the UK to China. Sure, China have an actual maglex system running every day and this is useful to prove it is technically workable but the Chinese system does not run into the centre of Shanghai (an irrelevance at best) and also the whole society in China is different, its economics are different, communism and state ownership dictate low costs to the public which makes it seem like a financial disaster. Again, ticket pricing could be calculated on running costs to recoup the outlay in, say, 10 years and this can be considered at the planning stage.
At the end of the day, I still cannot see any reasons, other than the practical concerns of building guideways or their aesthetics, to say that conventional rail is in anyway better. As I read before, it is like the Canal owners telling everyone that these new fangled trains would move so fast they would melt your eyeballs.
Technology has moved on, its a shame we can't.

500 kph high-speed trains

I have been following these guys for a while. They are called UK Ultraspeed and are a lobby group trying to convince the government that rather than spending vast amounts of money on conventional high speed rail which, because of their designs and limits, provide moderate benefits at best, for the same money you can install a very high speed system capable of running trains at 500 kph which is around 310mph.
Essentially we are talking about magnetically levitated trains running on specially built concrete guideways. They have superior acceleration, braking, quality of ride and safety compared to standard trains and of course extremely high top speed.
What I am particularly impressed by is that Ultraspeed are not simply pitching high-technology which is expensive but worth it, they are instead saying that not only are you getting better equipment for the same money but that there are major economic advantages to cities outside of London, something that sadly is not currently true. For instance, the standard high speed rail systems have separate east and west coast systems because of the pennine mountains, which cause either expensive tunnelling operations or would require gradients that are quite simply not possible on standard rails. If you want to travel from Manchester to Newcastle, you either have to get a slow train across to Leeds and then up to Newcastle or go up to Glasgow and back across Scotland. Any new lines are not going to be able to use the existing tunnels and will not spend the 100s of millions to bore new ones. Ultraspeed on the other hand can support steep gradients because of the magnetic drive system so that a new line could indeed cross the Pennines without tunnels. Imagine Liverpool to Manchester in 20 minutes, Manchester to Newcastle in 30 minutes and Newcastle to Glasgow via Edinbugh in 40 minutes. Imagine what that would do to encourage investment in these areas with a massive workforce and little employment.
The only objections can be that the guideways are elevated and not attractive. The system requires less land to be bought, has been tried and tested elsewhere, requires less trains, less staff, less control equipment and ties the country together in a single high-speed line for the SAME money as other proposals. The idea that standard systems can re-use existing rails is a red herring. There is simply not the capacity for any additional trains to use most parts of the current system and the delays and problems you encounter are frequently due to level crossings, freight trains and local trains, things that do not exist on the transrapid system. There really is no reason to go backwards with conventional rail any more.