Colorado Company Says It Plans To Test Hyperloop Transport System

Freshly Exhumed writes "Elon Musk's dream of a hyperloop transport system seems to be closer to reality than he anticipated. Hyperloop transportation, referred to by Musk as a "cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table", is a tubular pneumatic transport system with the theoretical capability of carrying passengers from New York to L.A. in about 30 minutes at velocities near 4,000 miles per hour, while maintaining a near-continuous G force of 1. Colorado-based company ET3 is planning to build and test its own version of such a hyperloop system, Yahoo reports." A more critical article would point out that the numbers presented seem absurdly optimistic; $100 for a 4,000mph cross country trip may be "projected," but construction of a cross-country train tube is a long way off, and so are ticket sales.

This may be Elon Musk's dream, but...

[Are You Kidding]

credit for the invention belongs to Dr. Joseph V. Foa who was awarded US Patent 3213802 for a "train in a tube" in 1965. This was the basis for a number of years of research into the concept at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1960s.

Re:Why would you build this in an earthquake zone?

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, but DC to NY is already a pretty short trip. Only 1 hour 10 in a plane, and it has rates starting from $156 (source, new Google maps). The problem with air travel is the security lines. If they could get rid of that, at least for short commuter flights, then flying would be much more enjoyable. The road trip time is 3 hours 43 minutes. Which isn't short, but easily something you could do if you needed to go there and back in the same day. A reasonable speed train (doesn't even have to be that fast) could probably do the trip in 2-3 hours if there wasn't a thousand stops. And trains don't have crazy security checks. Most of the time you can just walk right on 10 minutes before the train leaves. Something like this just isn't needed as it wouldn't take appreciably less time.

Re: Send packages first

[iamhassi]

They've only been dreaming of pneumatic tubes for 180 years or so, but they've never gone further than bank drivethrus and some buildings. Even something like the mail, that you would think would benefit greatly from pneumatic tubes compared to planes and vehicles, hasn't switched over. Truth is pneumatic tubes are great for short distances, but when you have them run over miles there's too many complications, if it breaks down you can't just hop off, you're stuck in a tube 100 miles from rescue. That's why we have been dreaming of it forever and had the technology for a hundred years but even countries with the money and means built bullet trains instead. We'll probably see Star Trek teleporters before pneumatic tubes http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube [wikipedia.org]

Re:Trans continental railway

[__aaltlg1547]

The transcontinental railway and most other railways it the USA made use of free (federally granted) land. The cost of land for a new right of way after industrial development would be enormous. You could estimate that cost by asking one of the major US rail carriers how much it would cost to buy or lease their right of ways. Buying is probably off the table entirely. They won't sell and without changes in federal law, can't be forced to sell.

Re:If this was possible...

[CohibaVancouver]

> What country has developed usable electric cars, for instance?

Japan.

> What country developed the internet?

Any country that is deploying fiber broadband nationwide. (Hint: Not the USA)

> Smartphones?

Finland & Korea, mostly.

Re:This may be Elon Musk's dream, but...

[joe_frisch]

Yes! I remember this idea from when I was growing up in the early 70s. Nothing wrong in principal, but there are the same practical difficulties today that there were 50 years ago. You need an enormous (read expensive) high vacuum system. Switching "tracks" is very difficult at those speeds, the switch sections would need to be tremendously long. Tubes need to be point to point and follow very smooth curves - probably means very deep underground construction. Mostly point to point connections means that you need a lot more length of tubes than you would need for rail. The high speeds limit the minimum train separation and limit throughput - or you need to accept possibly horrendous multi-train wrecks.

  While the system can recover the kinetic energy when it decelerates, it still needs a very high peak power output. The energy storage requirements if it is done onboard on the train are very difficult. If the energy is stored on the surface, then you either need active accelerating track (very expensive / length), or some way to transfer the power to the train (its much too fast for cantenary pickups).

You could in principal build something like this, but the capital costs would be huge. Consider the expected costs of the California high speed rail system - and that is just simple tracks on the surface.

I'd really love to see something like this (and have wanted to see it since I was a kid), but I just don't think its practical.

Re: Send packages first

[adolf]

They've only been dreaming of pneumatic tubes for 180 years or so, but they've never gone further than bank drivethrus and some buildings. Even something like the mail, that you would think would benefit greatly from pneumatic tubes compared to planes and vehicles, hasn't switched over.

But it did switch over. And it eventually switched back.

New York City, for one, once had a fairly comprehensive tube network [untappedcities.com] for mail delivery.

I'd like to think that we've learned a few things about metallurgy and other materials in the past 100 years that could make such a system far more viable today than it was way back then.

Doesn't anybody read anymore?

[Areyoukiddingme]

Doesn't anybody read the old masters of science fiction anymore? Slashdot, of all places, should already be familiar with all the details of subsurface evacuated tube transportation. This idea has been around for at least half a century, and has been electrically and mechanically feasible for decades. Financially is another story, which is why the whole thing is the pipe dream so cleverly pointed out by another poster.

But let's talk about the real concept, instead of all the (bad) guesswork.

An absolutely straight tube would be quite bad, especially for that distance. What you want is a great circle arc [wikipedia.org], and the only way to achieve one that's perfect enough and stable enough is to bury it and bury it deep, to avoid mountains, valleys, cities, etc.

It's not pneumatic. That's just silly. It's electromagnetic. You use coils at either end, accelerating with them on the way out and decelerating (and incidentally storing a great deal of the initial launch energy to be reused) at the end. Your vehicle is ballistic in the middle, in free fall. Helluva way to travel, but very cheap, energy-wise, assuming you build giant ring capacitors at each end to store the recovered energy each time the vehicle arrives. Then you only have to make up the losses in the system, which is reasonable to do. The tube is evacuated to vacuum to eliminate air resistance losses, which is so high at useful speeds that it prevents the whole system from working at all, never mind cost effectively.

And no, you don't switch. The tubes are point to point, and there's only one large vehicle per tube, going back and forth between each end. Of course, while you're at it, you might as well build two parallel tubes, 'cause the marginal cost of boring another hole isn't too bad. Still, the system has a hard capacity limit for each route. It's a very high limit if you build a large enough vehicle, but it's also a very hard limit. Once you hit it, the only way to expand capacity, beyond making the vehicle longer (a process with strictly diminishing returns with its own hard limit) is to bore another hole. Time-consuming and energy-intensive, at best.

Of course, it will never happen. Quite aside from property rights problems (land ownership extends right to the center of the Earth), the time and energy required to bore a hole long enough to be useful is extreme. It took 6 years to build the 50km long Channel Tunnel. At that rate, New York to LA would only take 579 years. (Admittedly the actual boring time wasn't anything like 6 years, but still... The project has all the same problems, magnified.)

We'll all be riding in self-driving all-electric vehicles long before anybody bores a transcontinental train tunnel.

Re:Discovery channel?

[RubberDogBone]

Is there a documentary I could watch that will give me some idea of the absurd disaster scenarios somebody has invented for this technology?

Yes, there was. Sort of. The show called Extreme Engineering has gone through a couple of completely different incarnations. The current one has a host on-camera. The show's original version was just a documentary with a narrator, normally Greg Stebner if I remember right. Stebner's version was vastly superior to the whiny current version. Not sure why they even bother to call the shows by the same name. They are nothing alike.

Anyway, the original,show did an episode on things like a transcontinental super train which was theorized to operate at supersonic speed in tunnels held at vacuum. So naturally there were examples of what would happen if the seal failed or there was an earthquake or other events. So it's not exactly like the domestic US concept but close enough.

No idea where you can find this old show. Discovery is fixated on rerunning the current version when they show it at all.