Virgin Hyperloop Shifts Its Focus From Passengers To Cargo (interestingengineering.com) 37
Virgin Hyperloop recently fired half of its workforce as the company is shifting its focus from transporting passengers to cargo, Financial Times reported. Interesting Engineering reports: Services of a total of 111 members of its staff were terminated in what was an unanticipated move according to the employees. A company spokesperson told FT that the COVID-19 pandemic had changed many things and the company was shifting focus to address the needs of the global supply chain. With a leaner staff setup, the company was hopeful of becoming more agile and cost-efficient as it focused on the cargo segment. DP World, a state-owned logistics group that holds a 76 percent stake in Virgin Hyperloop, told FT that 15 of its potential customers were interested in moving cargo through its infrastructure rather than humans since it involved less risk and required less regulatory approvals.
According to a Fortune report though, the company has found only one potential client in its lifetime, Saudi Arabia which is now keen on building a hyperloop cargo link between its port city of Jeddah and capital city of Riyadh. DP World spokesperson also told FT that profits from the project could be reinvested in building the human-compatible Virgin Hyperloop in the future.
According to a Fortune report though, the company has found only one potential client in its lifetime, Saudi Arabia which is now keen on building a hyperloop cargo link between its port city of Jeddah and capital city of Riyadh. DP World spokesperson also told FT that profits from the project could be reinvested in building the human-compatible Virgin Hyperloop in the future.
A crazy project to begin with. (Score:2)
They never got high speed rail going, despite many attempts, so they will not anything faster going as well.
It was a fun idea, though, which might have stood a chance in China or Japan. Otherwise, not going to happen.
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It was an Elon Musk pipe dream that he tweeted out. He's not very good with public transport in general, just look at his tunnel. It's actually worse than if they had just built a light railway.
Unsurprisingly, cargo that doesn't mind being accelerated at high G forces and which can withstand some severe jolts is more suited to a hyperloop than humans are.
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Thing is, they can't even accelerate it to high G/high speed.
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Re: A crazy project to begin with. (Score:1)
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I'm not sure anyone can claim that America has a high speed rail system, and the British Tories are doing their damnest to eliminate rail entirely.
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Aircraft are a lot worse than trains for many journeys.
You have to get to the airport, and it's almost always out of town. You need to arrive very early so you can get your bags checked in, go through security, walk to your gate. You get a tiny seat that is uncomfortable and everything costs extra - legroom, in-seat power for your devices, wifi, food and drink. When you arrive you have to get from the airport to your destination, which is rarely near where you landed.
Countries with high speed rail put the s
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China built more high speed rail than the rest of the world has combined. In a decade.
The US can do the same.
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The Hyperloop isn't "more advanced".
It's an old, old notion of vacuum trains that simply doesn't work because the logistics of vacuum chambers that large don't make sense.
Of course we don't have high speed rail going. In the US, rail has been a dying concern for everything except long haul cargo since the 60's.
The money isn't there. Thus the political will isn't there.
In Japan, the Shinkansen lines are relatively tiny things compared to what would be required in the US.
As you scale projects like this up,
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Again, what part about "commuter rail in the US is essentially a dead industry" was not understood?
Automobiles and the aviation industry effectively staked it in the heart.
Aviation handles long distance fast travel.
Automobiles handle short and medium range travel faster and with more prevision of destination.
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Re: A crazy project to begin with. (Score:2)
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It doesn't stand a chance in any portion of the universe where laws of physics hold.
This is what you get when you don't tax the rich (Score:1)
You get idiots trying to find dumber and dumber ways to exploit their obscene wealth rather than something useful for all of society. Huzzah.
Re: This is what you get when you don't tax the ri (Score:2)
I'd love to tax the Saudi royal family. (Score:2)
Now upping domestic production of oil could take some money out of the Saudi's coffers. Also Putin's. But I'm not in charge of that either.
Solar, windmills, electric cars... but somehow the Saudis are still rich.
Cargo was always a better option (Score:2)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That's cool, I learned a thing today. Thank you.
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It does not matter whether a coal transport takes a day or a week to get somewhere.
For people that difference is far more relevent.
You can get people out of the airplanes if you can deliver them a few thousand miles in a few hours.
Re: Cargo was always a better option (Score:2)
How about Food, esp cooled ( not frozen )?
Or Mail which is the single largest shipped item.
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Hyperloop just doesn't make sense. It costs too much. It's not particularly suitable for passengers and the vast majority of cargo doesn't care whether it takes 8 hours or 3 days to cross the country, so you might as well do any long hauling on traditional rail.
What would actually make sense right now with existing resources is to reactivate rail across the country on the existing right of ways. Instead lobbying groups funded with dark money are doing their best to kill rail across the nation. For example a
Not building it all is a better option still. (Score:2)
In a hurry? Use air freight.
This Is A Good Idea (Score:1)
They were not pointed at the real hot setup anyway. That would have been a hyperloop where you could drive your car onto it and just ride for as much as 300 miles at 600 mph. Get off, navigate the terminal, find the hyperloop going closer to your destination, ride that for up to 300 miles, repeat until you're reasonably close, then exit the system and drive to your final destination. No waiting for a train or airplane schedule, just arrive and proceed. No finding a rental car upon arrival, just dri
In case anyone forgot (Score:1)
Container sized hyperloop? (Score:2)
Anyone who has seen a ship port with container farm has an idea of what t
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Shipping containers come one width, but multiple heights and even more lengths. They also come in a variety of forms, like a tank in the middle of a container-sized frame. It doesn't make much sense to try to hyperloop containers on the basis that they are all the same, because they aren't. As you say, it makes much more sense to just put them on normal rails. Unfortunately, we've shut down and neglected many rail lines in this country, and even repurposed many rights-of-way for other transportation options
Re:Container sized hyperloop? (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone who has seen a ship port with container farm has an idea of what the problem is. Imagine that there are 50, (or more), platforms to load or unload containers onto hyperloop. After a container is loaded on a hyperloop car, off it goes and another hyperloop car can be staged at that platform. Reverse is also same, whence a cargo container is off-loaded from a hyperloop car, the car moves to a holding area until needed. But, that platform simply gets an another hyperloop car with container to be off-loaded.
Truckers don't even need to loose all their jobs. Just change of focus, moving the containers to and from the hyperloop inter-modal cargo yards. Plus, some can be re-trained to support hyperloop routing, managing and maintenance.
Container ports are my day job. What are describing is impractical in the sense that the you are wasting precious space by accumulating hyper loop cars with and without containers. A port could have 100,000's of containers so you will need more than 100,000's of hyper loop vehicles just sitting there doing nothing other than holding a single container, or holding nothing at all as they wait to be allocated. There is just not the land available to do that at a port (or anywhere close to a port, as container ports are typically located very close to population centers)
What happens now (on the systems I work on)
1. The crane offloads (up to 4) containers from the ship to trailers on a dock.
2. The trailers are moved (either with a human driver or an AGV) to the staging area close to the dock
3. A second crane moves the containers from the trailers to the stack of containers awaiting to be collected
4. When a truck arrives to collect a container, a third crane at the other end automatically picks the correct container and delivers it to the truck (or also to a train depending on the port)
That stack of containers waiting for collection is or the order to 50 x 5 x 6 containers stack up on each other, a total of 1500 containers per stack. One port I deal with has 40 or 50 stacks, all working to shift containers from ships to trucks. Unless you want to build vertical racks for your hyper loop vehicles, you are suggesting expanding a typical port by 30 times the land area currently in use. And on top of that there is all the extra complexity you need to be able to access containers on demand as containers don't flow in a linear sequence from ship to truck (EG the current systems can move containers around to facilitate access to particular containers).
About all the hyper loop vehicles can really do is move a container from ship to stack, but we already have AGVs to do that.
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No, I was not suggesting hyperloop was feasible or practical. It was just a thought exercise in what cargo means to some people. In this case, moving cargo means shipping containers either by big rig truck or train. So, I put forth what that could be, moving containers out of the shipping yard to much further places. But, we have trains for that, (if we use fix guideways). Or trucks that can generally use many roads.
I had forgotten about the variable height of the shipping conta
About time (Score:2)