The technology is still under development, although there are two short stretches of commercially operating maglev trains, one in Shanghai and the other in the central Japanese city of Nagoya.
Germany's traffic minister, Wolfgang Tiefensee, was in China at the time of Friday's accident, trying to urge officials there to extend their use of the German-made technology along the Shanghai route, a contract Japan sought but lost.
``We can't speak for the German company," Central Japan Railway spokesman Taro Yoshikawa said. ``But we've conducted extensive testing on our technology, and from a safety point of view, there are no concerns."
There have been no fatalities in test runs of the company's maglev, and the train has set a speed record with passengers aboard of 360 miles per hour.
The German-built maglev in Shanghai has safety systems that would prevent the type of crash that occurred last week, said Chang Wensen, a professor at the Maglev Research Center at the National University of Defense Technology in China.
That line has computerized systems that prevent two trains from being on one track at the same time and that automatically stop the train if there is an obstacle ahead, Chang said.
Chinese experts already were reassessing the Shanghai maglev's safety following an Aug. 11 fire in an electrical storage compartment beneath the passenger cabin that created large amounts of smoke but caused no deaths or injuries. Preliminary investigations attributed that mishap to an electrical fault.
Shanghai's maglev line covers the 19 miles to the city's Pudong International Airport in just eight minutes at speeds of up to 270 mph. Launched in early 2004, it is the world's first commercially operating magnetic levitation train line.
Japan's only commercially operating magnetic-levitation train, the local Linimo train near Nagoya, carries passengers on a 5.5-mile track at top speeds of 62 miles an hour.
