Hyperloop One teases idea of 50-minute London-Edinburgh ride

Re: Um

I admire Musk's achievements, but he is throwing far too much money away at a hilariously impractical idea.

I don't think he's using his money - the statements on funding suggest that its rich venture capitalists, risk-on sovereign wealth funds and the like.

Re: Um

And there's also the whole preventing a sudden loss of vacuum.

Indeed. We cannot afford losing the sheep velocity measurements!

:)

Re: Um

I'ts trivially simple engineering to deal with a sudden decompression. Each short section of track has its own pressure regulation, and electrically operated valves that will let air in to limit the maximum air pressure differential between sections. A major pressure loss in one section would then lead to air breaking of all the cars in the loop with the fiercest braking occurring closest to the breech. The cars then slowly limp to the nearest egress. It would be scary and inconvenient but not a major wreak except perhaps for the car that was adjacent to the actual point of failure.

Re: Um

"Because if that happens when a train is in motion, all the passenger will die in the resulting colossal wreckage."

No, they won't. A leakdown will result in rapid (but not deadly) deceleration of the capsules and the system is intended to "leak some" and be fitted with vacuum pumps at regular intervals. Fitting escape hatches at regular intervals is relatively straightforward as they can't be opened unless pressures are equalised anyway.

Switching is relatively straightforward, essentially using a tube-version of railway stub switches (which are commonly used in rollercoasters too). It's the speed of these switches which is going to determine the arrival cadence of pods.

WRT submarine tunnelling, in many ways this is an easier problem to solve than the civils for penetrating mountains and building viaducts as for the most part the tubes can be prefabricated, then sunk and stabilised at a given depth.

The simple solution for coping with the inevitable areas where tight radii or elevation changes are unavoidable is to slow down for those sections. It's not as if the pods are uncontrolled.

The bigger problem is that I can't see a passenger-only hyperloop being economically possible(*) and the last thing you want to do is have special freight pod sizes which mean everything has to be repacked out of ISO containers as this _really_ destroys freighting economics (railways only kept their viability by moving away from "wagonload" mixed freight to moving containers and dedicated cars). The tubes need to be big enough for a pod carrying a shipping container to run in them and at that point you're starting to approach (or exceed) the mass of a railway wagon, with all the civil engineering requirements that go with it.

(*) loads are cyclic for starters. Freight can run at night, and interspersed with passenger traffic in low periods. Railways have never managed to break even on passenger-only transport without massive subsidies.

Re: Um

"I admire Musk's achievements, but he is throwing far too much money away at a hilariously impractical idea."

The idea's been practical for 60 years. It's the costs of starting up that's the hurdle.

Trains are running as fast as they can practically go. Air friction requires megawatts to overcome and the practicalities of getting power from trackside to locomotive are difficult (pantographs don't work well at 350km/h). Running partially evacuated tubes with maglev means that you can go faster with less energy input AND propel the things more easily because the difficult parts are all stationary.

From the point of view of reducing carbon consumption, a decent fast rail system alone is enough to knock out the economics of london-edinburgh commuter flights, as even Amtrak's east coast corridor did to shuttle airlines between Boston and Washington DC. Hyperloop would do that for longer trips and is the probably face of a more-electric future.

Re: Um

But isn't most of that cost a matter of acquiring rights of way

Probably not. If you consider the topography of much of Northern and Western Britain, there's a problem with anything that is ground tracking at c700 mph. The gradient changes would incur significant vertical loads on the tube and supports which could be managed (at a cost) but you wouldn't have happy passengers when you pulled negative-g over every single summit you cross.

Which means that the civils work to build a hyperloop route will be significantly greater than the sluggish HS2 which runs at one third of the speed. Potentially you're going to have to build a lot of tunnels, and immense viaducts, even choosing the easiest routes. Take the arc from Liverpool to Edinburgh, and see how they avoid the difficult Cumbrian terrain, but still have to cross the Pennines and the Cheviots.

Re: You have obviously not understood the bubble economy

That's how we got the Iridium satellite system. That's how we got long distance fibre in Germany

That's how we got a lot of the UK rail network, during the "railway mania" of the 1840s, it's how we got the Channel Tunnel, and the HS1 link from the Channel Tunnel to London, the M6 Toll, and big chunk of the UK's cable networks.

This is a peculiar thing about infrastructure - in any extended build out it does provide very, very long term returns, but these are often well below prevailing interest rates, meaning that the investment makes a loss. Something China is now finding out. Without all the "free" concrete runways that became available after WW2, civil aviation would never have grown in the way it has.

Re: UK Fault lines

I seem to recall that somebody in the comments on a previous article on hyperloop pointed out how many people you could get in a hyperloop car compared to on a train, which seemed to make it impossible to be used as a mass transport system even if it was faster which would make it expensive beyond the point of making any economic sense whatsoever.

It's like Concorde in that respect. Incredibly cool design and engineering work that delivers people really quickly, but makes absolutely no economic sense whatsoever compared to the competition. I'd be surprised if hyperloop gets built on full scale honestly.

Re: UK Fault lines

"The BGS geology viewer might help you a bit"

Dammit! I've got a fault running more or less under the house!

Re: UK Fault lines

They're going about it all wrong. Why try to build a vacuum underground when we already have a perfectly good vacuum in space? Just run the pipe 100km above the earth and there's no need for an expensive tunnel.

So, who's investing then?

Re: UK Fault lines

"We stll get earthquakes (magnitude 3 or 4 max) even in southern England."

In geological terms the Southeast of England gets regular large quakes (5.8-6.5 or so every 350-450 years) and as it happens is more-or-less due for one "any day now" (the sequence centred in the Channel ideally should have had a bump in the last 200 years but nothing big enough has happened, which makes any likely quake that much more likely to be larger than smaller)

This sequence is recorded in recent history - 21 May 1382, 6 April 1580 - there should have been one in the last 100 years, but it hasn't happened. As SE England isn't built for them, the effects are going to be devastating (buildings were only generally made of brick/stone after the Great Fire of London and increasingly so in the last 200 years - but with no reinforcing)

These intraplate quakes are caused by africa colliding with europe. Think of them as ripples. :)

Well, the bridges in Istanbul work. Apart from the occasional shaking, tectonic movement is extremely slow.

"That crosses the divide between two tectonic plates."

Lots of engineering projects do, and there are few shear forces going on there so it's relatively straightforward

Re: Total travel time?

@Pete 2

I reckon the main use of this would be for freight, not people.

Why the heck would freight need to get from London to Edinburgh in 50 mins? Ice-cream without refrigeration?

Re: Total travel time?

Er, what about the 10years of your life it takes you to get to and then thru heathrow/luton/standsted/gatwick and then into edinburgh the other end?

Re: Total travel time? @Pete 2

The problem with your 1h15m flight is that (1) you first have to travel out to the airport, (2) you have to negotiate your way through checkin/security, (3) you and your fellow passengers all need to board while your luggage is placed in the hold. (4) your aircraft needs to push back from the stand, start its engine and taxy (slowly) to the runway, (5) fly the route, (6) land and taxy to the stand, (7) you need to walk from the aircraft to the baggage claim area. (8) you need to wait for your luggage to turn up, (9) you need to walk from the baggage area to public transport and (10) you need to travel in to your destination.

if you have any change from 3 hours when making that 1h15m flight then I'd be surprised. Trains let you load and unload your own baggage, have stations close to the centre of cities and don't require the same elaborate security. A 50 minute journey shouldn't take you much more than an hour.