Colorado Company Says It Plans To Test Hyperloop Transport System 258
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.
Discovery channel? (Score:2, Funny)
Is there a documentary I could watch that will give me some idea of the absurd disaster scenarios somebody has invented for this technology?
Re:Discovery channel? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Discovery channel? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Discovery channel? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
How much did I sleep last night? (Score:3, Funny)
It's already 3000 AD? Time to go shopping for my Lucy Liu bot and Slurm.
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Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Yes, and Howard Hughes had a dream (Score:2, Interesting)
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Let's judge Musk by his track record, not somebody else's, OK?
1. PayPal
2. Tesla
3. SpaceX
So far 3 out of 3 are successful, or at least looking that way. As to what will happen in the future, who knows? I don't, and you certainly don't either.
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The thing about geniuses is that they have 100 great ideas every day, one of which may prove to be practical. Musk has proven his genius and vision. What about you? Hughes? Not so much a genius as an entrepreneur/exploiter. He didn't come up with many novel/new ideas, but he had an ability to see which ones to exploit. That isn't to say that he didn't contribute to tech in his time, but compared to others, he was small potatoes... :-)
The "inventions" (ideas really) that Musk promotes are not his own, and he doesn't claim they are. He certainly doesn't claim this is his invention. That's nothing against him, in fact to me Musk is a geek's geek, but let's be as clear about his role as he is. He is a sort of Howard Hughes, but without as many movie stars hanging off him and AFAIK fewer CIA contracts. He also hasn't killed anybody that I'm aware of.
Send packages first (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see how fast it gets fresh salmon from Seattle to Kansas. Build a six inch wide tube or something. If that works out, then maybe think about humans.
Train accidents are bad enough already. 4000 mph? Would there even be anything left for the NTSB to sift through? What happens if the tube decompresses? Musk has some great ideas; but I think he's gone off the rails on this one.
Re: Send packages first (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Send packages first (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Musk has gone off the deep end a while ago, he's like George Lucas; who is going to challenge him now?
Anybody he asks to invest in his next project. How many billions has he sunk into Tesla Motors so far without generating positive cash flow? They just suck up more investor money each year.
Re:Send packages first (Score:4, Insightful)
Tesla Motors? You mean the only car company that got government loans and has already made enough money to pay them off early? You mean the same Tesla Motors that posted a quarterly PROFIT in May?
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With government subsidies in addition to the loans?
Tesla Motors has not made a profit in any normal government-less sense of the word.
It's a fully subsidized system (Score:2)
Gas taxes, license fees, tolls, etc. only pay for 51% of what the federal government spends on the roads that your car is on, with general tax dollars filling in the rest. Why stop at just subsidizing the roads themselves?
Re:Send packages first (Score:4, Interesting)
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He is in his 40s after all ... and senile as anyone else.
Wow, a new standard for age discrimination. I'm older than that and my mind is perfectly ... what was I saying?
P.S. Forget Logan's Run, Wild in the Streets [wikipedia.org] is a much better movie.
P.P.S. Sorry for the plot spoiler, but if you're over 18 you're over-the-hill.
Are ET3 and Musk actually connected? (Score:3)
The ET3 website [et3.com] looks like some kind of scam. They are offering to sell licenses for their amazing technology for only $100! I've seen it listed on several articles about Musk's plans, but I suspect that some lazy journalist just googled some shit and found that page.
Does anyone know if Musk actually has a company working on this technology?
Sounds legit. Ater all, what could go wrong? (Score:2)
Compressed air. Constant 1G acceleration. Underground tunnels. No problem!
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you know....you experience 1G of acceleration every moment of your life.
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No, standard cars don't. The best acceleration you can get in high end street cars is about 1G, but very few do that under any circumstance. The limit is the friction between rubber and road.
One of the standard performance measurements is 0-60 mph which is 88 fps. 10 seconds is a standard dividing line between slugs and ok, 5 seconds is very good but not exceptional. 5 seconds is 17.6 fpsps, which is 1/2 G. As far as I know, the fastest street cars do it in about 3 seconds, which is close to 1G.
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Better yet drive into a stone wall.
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Nearly every car can reach 3Gs without a problem - just apply the brakes.
Here are some guys doing actual measurements on hi-end Porsches. Less than 1.5G's tops.
http://forums.rennlist.com/rennforums/997-gt2-gt3-forum/715560-deceleration-g-force-readings.html [rennlist.com]
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Oh, I dunno, lets do some maths...
We don't know how much it will weigh, but lets just assume that loaded with passangers it weighs about as much as your average locomotive without any train cars attached... so 150 tons.
Traveling at 4000 miles per hour at peak speed...
and that comes out to about 57 tons of TNT going off if it impacts something.
On the bright side, if anything went wrong, you'd never know. I believe your nervous system has been calculated at under 600mph.
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You're equally fucked in the extremely rare circumstance your airplane falls out of the sky. Yet, we take that risk for the convenience of travel (and the free gropings).
And, like you said, if something goes wrong, you'll never know. I'd rather have instant, painless oblivion than minutes of sheer screaming terror as I fall from 10,000 feet.
This may be Elon Musk's dream, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This may be Elon Musk's dream, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's far older than that, of course. Isambard Bunuel was tinkering with 'atmospheric railway' hardware a century and a half ago. Patents issued in Britain, 1838.
Re:This may be Elon Musk's dream, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a bit of a pipe dream to me...
Re:This may be Elon Musk's dream, but... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Yes! I remember this idea from when I was growing up in the early 70s.
Yep. Some TV science fiction movies were even made featuring it back then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_II_(film) [wikipedia.org]
An elaborate "Subshuttle" subterranean rapid transit system was constructed during the 1970s, due to the vulnerability of air transportation to attack. The Subshuttles utilized a magnetic levitation rail system. They operated inside vactrain tunnels and ran at hundreds of miles per hour. The tunnel network was comprehensive enough to cover the entire globe. The PAX organization inherited the still-working system and used it to dispatch their teams of troubleshooters.
. . . created and produced by . . . Gene Roddenberry . . .
TFA: "ET3's Hyperloop-like project " (Score:2)
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ET3 ~ evacuated tube propulsion
Hyperloop ~ pneumatic tube but with magnetic propulsion (air pressure would keep "cars" from colliding instead of being used to pull the cars along)
$100 (Score:3)
Yeah, sure. Assuming you can get the Federal Government to build the whole thing so that you only have to cover marginal operating costs instead of amortizing construction costs into the price, and each seat is filled every time, and you count in 1950's dollars ;-)
Or this? (Score:2)
The words 'Elon Musk' and 'Loop' make me think of the Lofstrom [wikipedia.org] variety, not underground tunnels.
The Very High Speed Transit System (Score:3)
Let me fix that for you (Score:2)
LA to SF in 30 minutes. Still much faster than current high speed rail, but nowhere near as insane as NY to LA in 30 minutes. Getting a mass transportation vehicle to travel at Mach 5.2 might happen one day, but we will have to see many evolutionary steps between now and then.
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we will have to see many evolutionary steps between now and then
What better time to start taking them than now?
Honestly I'm a bit skeptical of this one though. I've been hearing about this approach since I was a teenager. Still, I'd rather hear about some dreams than listen to this frickin' "can't be done" whine that seems to have become so popular in this country. I suppose a trans-continental railroad or electric power to every home is unrealistic too.
1G? (Score:3)
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I still wouldn't want to spend three minutes accelerated into my seat at 1G and then another 3 minutes pushed against the straps when slowing down.
Why not? 1g is an incredibly small and very comfortably acceleration amount. You're thinking of the feeling of a roller coaster, but those give you between 2 and 4 gs.
1 g of acceleration towards your back plus 1 g of acceleration down (gravity), will essentially give you a force vector at a 45 degree angle with magnitude sqrt(2) or ~1.4 g. Essentially you're going to feel like you're in a recliner (and yeah, about 40% heavier) for about 3 minutes. Then to avoid the weird feeling when decelerating, the c
Wrong focus (Score:3)
NY-to-LA at 4000mph for a fortunate few at inconceivably-enormous cost? That may have appeal for the self-appointed "job-creators", but strays laughably far from any possible reality.
In a local transit scenario, this technology will rule. Support infrastructure is very lightweight. The path of individual tube "cars" under computer control means NON-MASS transit with highly-individualized trajectories for everyone, right down to the sub-neighborhood level. No engines, no fuel, no batteries, just huge centralized (and thus greatly efficient) vacuum generators powered with *whatever*. Vacuum-powered "switches" so simple that (apart from seal maintenance) there's nothing to fail. Acceleration and braking through sectorized control of pressures.
Doesn't anybody read anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Only if your target market is the East coast and you don't foresee the need to test against such scenarios...
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Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
Re:Why would you build this in an earthquake zone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?
Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. I've seen the interviews and public statements about the idea, but frankly neither this particular article nor any other shows anything other than another high-speed transport system. I'll agree that vacuum tube transport systems seem to fit the concept of hyperloops from the perspective of "this is the best thing that fits the idea", but all of that is pure guess work. There are other possibilities too, but the real point is that nobody has a clue.
It seems, based on some statements by Musk, that some actual engineering R&D work has gone into the idea (aka there might be some people at either Tesla and/or SpaceX that have helped Elon with some calculations and fleshing out the concept) but he certainly has made no public statements about the concept in any level of detail.... including even if there will be vacuum tubes involved in any part of the system. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".
In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.
Re:Why would you build this in an earthquake zone? (Score:4, Insightful)
[Nukenerd] Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
[Teancum] I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?
No. But some of the links I followed (eg www.businessinsider.com/what-is-elon-musks-hyperloop-2013-5) referred to an evacuated tunnel.
[Teancum] Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".
I am a former London Undergound railway engineer and I can tell you that the air resistance in a tunnel is higher than in the open, and that there is no way that 4000 mph is going to be possible in a tunnel unless it is evacuated. The train would melt otherwise, even if you could give it the power.
[Teancum] In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.
Agreed.
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True, it was the astronomical costs that prevent building high speed rail projects on the East Coast, much less a DC-to-NY high speed commuter. Man, if Musk can push a DC-to-NY commuter line, this would make that NY-to-LA dream more attractive.
And about that earthquake concern, they still built that rail line project in LA anyway, that's been beneficial to residents.
Re:Why would you build this in an earthquake zone? (Score:4, Informative)
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Seems to me a terrorist attack in a tunnel would be more crippling than one one a plane. It's probably not as big of a target though because 1) only the people on that train are in danger and 2) choking important infrastructure doesn't have nearly the "shock and awe" affect that terrorist go for,like crashing planes into things.
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1 hour 10 in a plane
3 hrs in the airport.
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Nobody else wants to hire big fat ugly people.
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They could even charge a premium for that service and make the TSA self-funding. Maybe even return money to the government. More proof that bureaucracies have no imagination.
P.S. Don't forget an equivalent service for the ladies. Let's not be sexist here (or pass up any business opportunities, like the cosmetics companies that didn't market to black women for years).
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Most of the time you can just walk right on 10 minutes before the train leaves.
I don't know about the US (except that most people there seem scarcely to have heard of trains), but in the UK you can board most trains seconds before they leave. At a main terminus such as London Paddington it may be a minute because there is such a high throughput that they want the train to be ready to go immediately it gets the green light.
What is the ten minutes for?
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Wouldn't the east coast make more sense?
Why would you build this in a terrorism zone?
Re: If this was possible... (Score:3)
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While it's true the US has been losing its edge in technological development, what other countries have really stepped up and filled that space? What country has developed usable electric cars, for instance? What country has developed private spaceflight? What country developed the internet? Smartphones?
The US is definitely going down in a lot of ways, but no one else seems to be shining in technological innovation either; everyone else either does only manufacturing or continues the use and development
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Japanese developed usable electric cars if you define usable by affordable and available to the population, unlike the Teslas. USA gave a try earlier in our century, but it was killed by your greed and capitalist system (see the documentary "who killed the electric car").
Private spaceflight occurs mainly in Russia. They were also the first to have a usable space station up there (skylab was a bad joke). NASA are experts in developing and sending probes and robots, I give you that. But again, greed and paran
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Private spaceflight occurs mainly in Russia.
I thought Russia's industry was a state-owned company that was spun off into a private entity. That's not exactly the same as a private company building itself up from nothing. They're also having a lot of problems [universetoday.com].
The USA developed the basics of the Internet backbone, but look at the current customer situation (which is all that matters, really), you can have 100mbps symmetrical in Japan, Slovakia, Estonia for 10-15$/month. In the USA you can have 10mbps with a
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Japan.
> What country developed the internet?
Any country that is deploying fiber broadband nationwide. (Hint: Not the USA)
> Smartphones?
Finland & Korea, mostly.
Re:Trans continental railway (Score:4, Insightful)
The TCR made ample use of cheap freed slave and immigrant labor
Why do you think it wouldn't be accurate robots building this thing, end-to-end?
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Why do you think it wouldn't be accurate robots building this thing, end-to-end?
Adjusted for inflation, the $110 second-class trans-continental rail fare of 1870 would cost $1970 today. In 1880 land grants to the railroads were valued at $391 million, a breath-taking sum for the day. Construction on this scale does not come cheap even labor costs are low.
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Who would remain to pay the 100$ tickets if robots did all the jobs?
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If by something better you mean bankers, lawyers, marketers and medias in general, count me out.
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People who have something better to do with their lives than digging ditches.
Actually a backhoe operator makes pretty good money.
There is very little demand for manual ditch digging anymore. Even if you could find workers willing to accept minimum wage it isn't cost effective compared to a backhoe.
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Politicians and Unions would make sure that robots would never see the light of day on something like this
That probably explains why all construction work in the US is done by guys with shovels. Imagine the efficiency improvements if they could use backhoes, trucks, tunnel boring machines, etc.
Re:Trans continental railway (Score:4, Informative)
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The cost of land for a new right of way after industrial development would be enormous.
Uhh .... underground mean anything to you?
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Re:Trans continental railway (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, installing a new cross country underground tube should be no problem at all to get done right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline [wikipedia.org]
Oh wait...
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The objections to that pipeline are mostly about the use of tar sands and possible oil spills. This would be a different animal. Of course there would be some opposition, but nothing like the pipeline.
P.S. Similar objections were raised about the Alaska pipeline (us old fogeys remember such stuff). It was still built, and probably built better because of the opposition. Who knew that the real problem would be sailing a ship into a reef.
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Indeed, who wrote that incident was like the biggest DUI of all time, the drunk had a 70 mile wide road, but he let a kid in the back seat drive with no headlights and managed to wreck the car on a streetlight?
Re:Trans continental railway (Score:5, Insightful)
The drunken captain, bad as that was, wasn't the cause of the accident. He was asleep in his bunk, and the ship was being piloted by someone who was qualified. The drunken captain bit was played up to distract from Exxon's culpability, like choosing not to fix a radar that was broken for a year, in order to save a few bucks. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill#Identified_causes [wikipedia.org]
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property rights in many places extend underground and would still require a lot of above ground infrastructure and access ways for maintenance purposes.
Eminent Domain works wonders (Score:2)
property rights in many places extend underground and would still require a lot of above ground infrastructure and access ways for maintenance purposes.
Eminent Domain works wonders, particularly for establishing public rights of way, but also for taking your property, which isn't making me mone, so that I can build a mall or hotel or some other business or a roadway there.
Re:Trans continental railway (Score:4, Insightful)
They could use the NYS Thruway model. "We'll only charge tolls until the road is paid off. And then just keep raising tolls long after the road is paid off."
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Technically I think tickets could be considered tolls.
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The NYS Thruway is nothing. Look at NYC bridge tolls. Some of them are on interstates, and for years violated federal law about what tolls could be for bridges on interstates. Simple fix: they changed the law. Same thing for the NYS Thruway (and the Mass. Turnpike). They were built before the interstate system, so in incorporating them into the system there was an agreement to let the states charge tolls for another 30 years. Guess what happened after that.
Re: Trans continental railway (Score:2)
The toll roads are usually better quality than the non toll roads
What exactly is the problem with paying for good infrastructure?
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The Interstate system has minimum standards for road quality. I-90 charges tolls for the majority of its stretch across NYS. All of the spurs (I-190, 290, 390 and so on up to 990) are not toll roads, but are still interstates. I've driven the entire length of I-90 in NY a number of times as well the full length (or close to) of most of its spurs in NY (excepting only I-990). The quality is pretty much the same on all of them. The Thruway does get more frequent repairs and upgrades, but it's also a much busi
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What exactly is the problem with paying for good infrastructure?
Nothing. What I object to is paying for it several times over.
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The toll roads are usually better quality than the non toll roads
What exactly is the problem with paying for good infrastructure?
Nothing. I just don't want to rent it, and then be denied access when I don't choose to continue paying rent.
I prefer the German model: the contractor who offers the best overall cost and warranty for N years of road gets the contract.
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I rank toll collectors up there with the guy who turns the sign between Stop and Yield in construction sites as people that should have been replaced by computers and robots a decade ago.
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flagmen are a negligible part of the construction costs, and the construction contractors make money on them anyways. zero incentive for making an automated system.
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A new transportation system that would cost billions to build, would be completely uneconomical for patrons to use, and has a high risk of death with even the slightest malfunction at 4,000 MPH.
I'm not convinced that it would be uneconomical.
The cost of actual transport would be in the production of acceleration and overcoming losses from friction. The idea lends itself to believe it will experience very low amounts of friction. So how much energy is required to accelerate 4 tons (figure pulled from my ass, but these would be 6 passenger "capsules") to 4000 MPH, and how much does that energy cost in practice?
Quick reasoning in my head suggest far less than $100 to accelerate a 4-ton capsule t
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A new transportation system that would cost billions to build, would be completely uneconomical for patrons to use, and has a high risk of death with even the slightest malfunction at 4,000 MPH
This sounds like someone complaining about the airplane in 1905. Part of progress is failure, and since we just dropped three to five trillion dollars on the Iraq War, let's hear a little bit less how expensive government subsidies for science are.
If we had spent just one third of what we wasted in Iraq on something like a national rail transportation, we could have created hundreds of thousands of jobs that trained people in high-level construction and engineering, strengthened our air transportation syste
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keep taking risks and one day you fail
If you stop taking risks you've already failed.
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Re:Math doesn't seem right (Score:5, Funny)
Nearly 3000 miles of travel, at up to 4000 mph, in 30 minutes?
It's a fast 4000 mph, not a normal 4000 mph.
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doh, forgot 6000 KPH conversion So that's 1700 meters per second. 0.5 * 200000 * 1700^2 = 3 * 10^11, so yes a mere 75 tons of TNT. how do we stop that train on a dime though?