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Why Ultra-Efficient 4,000 mph Vacuum-Tube Trains Aren't Being Built
cylonlover writes "In the 1800s, when pneumatic tubes shot telegrams and small items all around buildings and sometimes small cities, the future of mass transit seemed clear: we'd be firing people around through these sealed tubes at high speeds. And it turns out we've got the technology to do that today – mag-lev rail lines remove all rolling friction from the energy equation for a train, and accelerating them through a vacuum tunnel can eliminate wind resistance to the point where it's theoretically possible to reach blistering speeds over 4,000 mph (6,437 km/h) using a fraction of the energy an airliner uses – and recapturing a lot of that energy upon deceleration. Ultra-fast, high efficiency ground transport is technologically within reach – so why isn't anybody building it? This article looks into some of the problems."
Yes, like aeroplanes and submarines...
If you don't reach for the stars you will never get there, if you try, you might.
Who wants to accept the liability if passengers/surrounding objects get turned into goo when a tiny defect causes the 4000 mph object to decelerate in a not-quite-so-planned manner?
Perhaps it could work, but the technology and mechanics would have to be pretty darn reliable or people would arrive as pâté
We're having a dickens of a time getting our Bullet Train going in California, which has finally been green-lighted to sell bonds and collect some federal funding.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When the British did it they had hella mechanical problems. The smallest glitch with a seal and suddenly your trains aren't moving nearly as fast anymore. You'd have to build two tunnels: the vacuum tunnel for the train, and then a slightly larger outer tunnel that allows for service and leak detection.
So all the subway users in New York are house cleaners and students? Wrong. The reason why only poor people use it in other cities is because most public transportation was built around cities that were not designed for it, therefore driving your own car is more efficient, and therefore poor people that don't have cars obviously have to use it. Building public transportation in large spread out city after the fact is a complete waste of money, doesn't matter what kind; e.g. bus, rail, subway, or these new "tubes" - they just won't work in the suburbs.
At the same time?
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
If man was meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
this idea sucks
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Use it for cargo first, and if there are no problems we can start using it for passengers. But the cost is a big obstacle.
Wake me up when someone actually manages to build a tunnel anywhere near that size that's vacuum tight and has a realistic notion of what size and number of vacuum pumps would be required to keep a high enough vacuum in it. Oh, and handling the exterior pressure loading without risk of accidental implosion would be nice. ;)
The other problem which is less trivial than it might seem is how to get people and cargo (and possibly vehicles) onto and off of these trains without breaking the vacuum .. really big airlocks at the stations maybe? .. and how to evacuate one of these safely in case of an emergency on the main line ..
No, kinetic energy goes with the square of velocity. So to accellerate from 3000 to 3050 mph takes as much as to get from 0 to 550 mph. The rest of the article may be interesting, but it's strange they make errors like that.
They do have a warmer more 'natural' sound
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'm not half as think as you drunk I am.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
It's the mile-low club.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Why do hot dogs come in packages of 10 but hot-dog rolls in packages of 8?
Two for Fido.
It is more efficient to build a giant robot maid to attach an equally gigantic vacuum cleaner to the outer atmosphere and suck the air out.
Suck...suck...suck.
And if man wasn't meant to have sex with sheep then God wouldn't have made them so damn sexy!
hopefully the passenger dispersal method will be safer than just dumping us on the curb
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Because the simple-minded mythology that people create for themselves is just that: feel-good pseudo-engineering that makes no sense whatsoever.
For an AC that was a brilliant post. However a little brief. As a "real engineer" who can do estimation and think thru technical problems the biggest problem is the vacuum tube is a waste of money and time and land. For a much smaller scale example you could reduce the "indicated air speed" as a pilot would call it of the TGV in France merely by installing gigawatts worth of walmart kitchen fans pointing such that the train gets a nice tailwind. However if you run the numbers it turns out you can get the same performance increase with merely megawatts of extra train power. Similarly, you could invest in terawatts of distributed vacuum pumps, but it turns out you can go just as fast merely by using gigawatts of train power...
Generally speaking in engineering making the immense part more expensive to make the little part cheaper doesn't pay off, for sufficient value of immense. For example, it turns out to be way the heck cheaper to make a long distance transmission line HVDC than to upgrade every tower long the route higher dielectric strength and taller and bigger footings etc etc. To a crude first approximation this is why sea transport is cheaper per ton-mile than train transport. Another example in the US outside hyperurbanized areas its cheaper to buy each user a taxi and taxi driver than to build passenger rail. I like trains and I like riding in trains but even I realize they're an economic disaster.
In fact it turns out to be cheaper to build a self-levitating and self propelling vehicle than to build a really long and terribly complicated track. I think I shall call my new invention the aeroplane.
The other problem is economic. Any 4000 MPH solution is terrifyingly expensive, so even zero interest expense makes it horrendously expensive. If you can get it cheaper than merely hiring someone far away, or booting up a PC running skype... For example, even during the Concorde era it didn't make financial sense to ship a salesman between NYC and London on the Concorde, it turns out to be cheaper to simply open a sales office in both cities and hire staff in each. Somehow this tremendously more expensive solution is supposed to work even better under conditions where cheaper solutions miserably failed?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I don't get what the author of this article wins by proposing such ridiculously exagerated speeds. Sadly, this kind of nonse plagues sci-fi-like tech news since tech news exists.
I see no need for a train going at 6000 km/h. But the idea could be interesting even at much lower speeds. A vaccuum tunel based maglev going at 600 km/h would already be quite at win for energy efficiency. But as long as it costs less to build and maintain reactors to power electical trains, you won't see any of these around.
Probably its time that /. posts links to Wikipedia entries to be at least a little more informative.
If one would have looked up Wp, one could have found this, quote: "Vactrains have occasionally appeared in science fiction novels, including the works of Arthur C. Clarke (Rescue Party, 1946), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, 1950), Peter F. Hamilton (The Night's Dawn Trilogy), Joe Haldeman (in his novel Buying Time), Larry Niven (A World Out of Time), Robert A. Heinlein (Friday), Jerry Yulsman (Elleander Morning), and Jasper Fforde (the Thursday Next novels). Flash Gordon (1947) and the movie Logan's Run (1976) featured similar high-speed transport trains. The Space: 1999 TV series, featured a Lunar Vactrain. 23rd century San Francisco has one stretching across the Golden Gate Bridge in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Earlier Gene Roddenberry television productions, Genesis II and Planet Earth, featured such transport systems.".
CC.
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G-force is on our side. Its spectra you have to worry about.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
XKCD reference
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
It's the mile-low club.
Technically its the "mile per second club".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I question your $2 million per mile figure. Minneapolis/St Paul is currently building a 10 mile light rail line at a cost of $1 billion. ($100 million per mile) That's at street level through a moderately dense urban area and it includes the cost of all the stations. Maybe $2 million per mile is the cost through flat countryside with no stations and land acquired for free?
/...
Will never happen because:
one- The United States is broke. They pissed away all their money on permanent unwinnable wars, housing scams, and Wall-Street bank bailouts. The idea that they would be able to spend trillions of dollars to build 1000 mile long tubes to convey peasants across North America at 4000 MPH is absurd.
two: Present company excepted, but Americans are technologically incompetent at long-term projects. All their bridges and highways are in disrepair, and they can't even get 50MPH trains to run competently. Didn't they once even have a space program?
three: What's the point of moving thousands of people around? For every person in one place, there is a another person in just like them in any place that you would send them to.
four: Walk to any corner and there's a McDonalds, a Bank of America, a Chevron gas station, and a Starbucks. Travel a thousand miles in any direction and you're on a corner with a McDonalds, a Bank of America, a Chevron gas station, and a Starbucks. What's the point of travel?
Trains are an economic disaster in the US, and it is not for any sort of engineering reason (you can look at pretty much any other industrialized modern country in the world and see that trains actually work out pretty damn well).
For moving people around, this is a useless concept. But why not use it for cargo? That significantly reduces the risk and complexity of the "train" itself. If you could move a few thousand freight containers from a Pacific port to an Atlantic port in a couple of hours, that would surely provide significant economic returns, and potentially open up much cheaper and faster ChinaEurope shipping lanes.
Hard to say if any of that would be enough to make the upfront costs worth it, mainly since I don't see an estimate of what those actual costs would be. I wouldn't be surprised if it were well more than $1 trillion though.
Feh, that only happens to tourists.
I take it this is why we don't/won't have space elevators?
"That's either incredibly asinine or the most brilliant troll I've ever read. Not sure which." -Anonymous Coward
At one g it's 3 minutes, 2 seconds, I believe. (Using Wolfram Alpha 4000 mph / 1 g acceleration).
The reason the vacuum systems went out of favor was the massive associated fire risk. At first, it doesn't seem obvious why a vacuum system would have a fire risk, as in theory the vacuum should extinguish the fire. However, this doesn't work in practice.
What actually happens is the fire starts outside the vacuum system, where it has access to air. The fire then causes this air to expand. The logical place to expand is straight into the nearest low or negative pressure environment around, which is the vacuum system. In no time at all, the vacuum transportation system spreads the fire between floors - and disaster ensues.
Vacuum transportation systems used to be popular in multilevel buildings of large companies. Then one by one they caught fire. Eventually, the fire codes understood the significance of plenums and air return systems in spreading fires. Now any kind of vacuum, plenum, or return air space that stretches between floors has special safety devices inside it. They are extremely dangerous spaces if fires occur.
Additionally, vacuum systems were never used to transport people, because if air integrity on the capsule fails, then everyone suffocates.
We have free health care. It's called WebMD. Remove prescription requirements for non-narcotics and you eliminate 80-90% of health care demand.
I think you need to look at countries other than the US.
Trains are an economic bonanza in the US. Freight trains are still trains.
Limit your comments to passenger trains, and you might think it is true. Then you realize they're competition g with heavily subsidized highways.
Are you sure you don't understand why a decentralized "pod" system wouldn't work?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Not necessarily. Bear in mind that when you're talking about accelerating to 4,000 MPH, you're limited to very-long-distance travel. Bear in mind, we're talking about Los Angeles to New York City in a little over half an hour. This wouldn't replace subways, but rather would replace jets and trains.
Also, when public transit is used by people who can afford cars, it is usually because driving is unholy in those cities. It would be more precise to say that public transit doesn't work unless the normal road system is hopelessly broken, which is not the case in the suburbs.
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Airlocks? Docking a train in a near-vacuum tunnel to a station has to be considerably easier than docking two spacecraft in a vacuum.
At those speeds, flames would be the least of your worries. a 20,000kg train at 6400kph carries the kinetic energy of a 8,000kg of TNT (31GJ). It would take 3 minutes to get to that speed with a constant 1G acceleration and require a 17MW output engine, and would travel 160km while getting up to speed.
For moving people around, this is a useless concept. But why not use it for cargo? That significantly reduces the risk and complexity of the "train" itself.
If you have to choose between an expensive train and a cheap track, or a really expensive track and a cheap train, which is better? I guess it depends on their relative expense. But, I expect that these days, the cost of the trains themselves is almost negligible compared to the expense of running the tracks.
There's been enthusiasm for underground tunnels in science fiction since at least the 1920s. Tunnels, though, are hard to build. Read a few issues of "Tunnels and Tunneling" to get a sense of the problems.
Solid ground isn't really that solid. Tunnel projects encounter sand, silt, water, oil, natural gas, shale, coal, and salt. Each requires different techniques, and most can't support an open in space in them. Tunneling often involves building a structure able to hold the tunnel bore open. Support rings, props, rock bolts, shotcrete, and steel are used when necessary. A single long tunnel job may encounter all of those.
As a construction project, a tunnel has a major logistical problem - most of the work is at the cutting face. So there's not much parallelism. Major tunnels are bored from both ends. In some cases, shafts are dug to intermediate points to allow advancing from multiple locations.
That option is possible on land, but slow and expensive for deep tunnels. It was used for the 57km Gotthard Base Tunnel, and required digging two access shafts around a kilometer long. That job took 14 years of tunneling.
Underwater tunnel projects are usually limited to working from both ends. In a few cases, existing islands, or even artificial ones, have been used to gain access points. The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line has an artificial island.
Large tunnel projects today seem to run about US$0.2bn to $1bn/kilometer. It's much more expensive in urban areas or earthquake-prone areas. Hard rock tunnel projects are slow, but not overly expensive. Tunnels in difficult ground get very expensive.
The point is things like planes weren't possible until gasoline engines, very quickly powered flight went from impossible to possible due to one technology and some smart people.
So:
1. Don't stop dreaming
2. Your Religion of Pessimism is just as bad, so STFU
"Miles per hobo".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Trains work in the US when shipping freight. The work for passengers in the northeast. However, cars are far more convenient everywhere else.
Case study:
Trip to Norfolk, VA from NYC area.
Fly: ~$300 per person round trip. You get one carry-on bag per person. 1.5 hrs each way + 4 hrs of transit/wait time.
Train: ~$250 per person round trip. You can carry more on. 8 hrs each way + 2 hrs of transit/wait time.
Car: ~$75 per car round trip. You can carry even more. 6 hrs each way; no wait time.
Now, if I didn't already have a car with sunken capital costs, then there is an argument. But even then, I would rent a car. Either way, it is cheaper and takes less time to drive than take the train.
In contrast, it would be crazy to drive into NYC when the train station is right next to where I am. Flight is almost always better if time is a factor.
And don't tell me "it's different in Europe". I was in Germany. I can drive from Munich to Berlin faster than the ICE train. And the train ride costs $150+ each way per person.
Outside of heavily subsidized metro area trains, I have not seen a train compete with the cost, let alone the time and convenience of driving alone. When you add a 2nd person, it just gets crazy to take a train.
Hah. I rode the train daily with Goldman Sachs guys who lived in houses I can barely *dream* of owning. The train was more convenient from Summit NJ to Manhattan than any other kind of transport, including helicopters (according to one of the guys, after his second paper-bag beer one Friday*). Apparently helicopter transport to NYC is a pain in the ass, because the helipads are not conveniently located -- either on the departing side or the arriving side.
*So every Friday, four GS guys who always sat in the same spot, would have beers on the train. One of the guys retired, and they need a fourth to occupy the seats -- they didn't want some random person sitting with them. They asked me to sit with them, it lasted about two months until circumstances made it better for me to commute by bus instead of train. These guys would pound a beer (or two) in Penn Station waiting for their train, then drink another one (or two) on the 40-minute train ride home... they jokingly said it was the ammunition they needed to deal with their wives for an entire weekend.
But I digress...
If you take the Morris & Essex express into Hoboken or NY, which skips all or almost all the stops in Essex county, you'd believe that it's only the *wealthy* who take trains.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
My favorite thing about slashdot is all the people that assume that if they can't solve a problem by the time they post a comment, the problem is unsolvable.
Have you ever heard of airlocks?
Learn to love Alaska
Stopping the capsules when loss of power occurs is just a matter of simple friction brakes like on high speed elevators.
And what makes you think we can't fly over the North Pole???
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Trains only work when government subsidizes them. FOR the cost of the new California High Speed Rail, that won't actually be useful until just before it is completed (i.e. nobody could ride it anywhere useful), you could give every man, woman and child a whole bunch of passes on Airlines from more places in the state than the CA HSR would actually go. And it would take less time to travel to said places. And cheaper.
The way I explain it, we already have HSR, they are called Airplanes. HSR was designed for one thing only, to curry favor with the Unions that will build and run them. It is a Union Make Work Program .
Here's the math ...
Cost of the HSR system (current est) 65,400,000,000 (this is nearly 50% more than the ballot said it would be) It will be much higher when all is said and done.
Actual Population of California 38,000,000
Short versions of the numbers 65,400 / 38 = $1721 per man/woman/child
Cost of a plane ticket $68-$250 one way. That is SEVEN free (high cost) tickets per man woman and child in CA. THIS does not count the actual cost of the ticket to ride the train. And all the projections, even from the Rail Authority, tell us that the cost will have to be continually underwritten by the tax payers.
I have yet to have a person make any sort of reasonable argument why we should spend that kind of money in a state that is going broke.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The military has already invented caffeinated bacon, and you can get baconated coffee at select retail outlets.
Just be patient. The futurama will happen eventually.
You guys always point to reality...as a defense for your delirious mental illness about space. Doesn't work that way.
Ummm...yeah. What do you want people to point to instead? The Starship Enterprise? That's kind of the the point. You say that ${futuristicConcept} can't be done because of insurmountable technical obstacles. Other people point to ${formerFuturisticConceptThatIsNowReality} as a counter-example of something once thought impossible, but now taken for granted. For years, people said it was impossible to fly in a heavier-than-air, powered aircraft...then our friends Wilbur and Orville (or Glen Curtiss, depending upon who's revisionist history you choose to subscribe) did it. People thought that rockets couldn't "fly" in a vacuum because there was "nothing to push against." Then the Russians launched Sputnik. All (or at least "many") experts said we will never exceed the speed of sound...then Gen. Yeager did it. The point of all of these examples is that people thought a number of various things were impossible...until someone figured out a way to get around the obstacles that people thought were "insurmountable." Griping that pointing "to reality" to argue that things are only impossible until someone accomplishes those things is, in fact, the way it works.
Those things were built because they were able to build them...
True statement is true, yes. Your point?
What you are blatantly ignoring is that people didn't think those things were possible -- exactly as you don't think various things are possible now. The problem wasn't that things were intrinsically impossible; it's that people were approaching the problem from pre-conceived notions based upon the limitations of existing technology. In what way are the things you currently say are impossible merely limited by our current understanding of physics? This may come as a shock to you, but...(wait for it)...we don't know EVERYTHING yet. Therefore, we can't predict what "impossible" things will become possible when some "Eureka!!!" moment shows that something we all thought we understood gets shattered wide open by a new discovery. When we get that insight, things that we thought were impossible might suddenly become trivial.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Trip to Norfolk, VA from NYC area.
Fly: ~$300 per person round trip. You get one carry-on bag per person. 1.5 hrs each way + 4 hrs of transit/wait time.
Train: ~$250 per person round trip. You can carry more on. 8 hrs each way + 2 hrs of transit/wait time.
Car: ~$75 per car round trip. You can carry even more. 6 hrs each way; no wait time.
By "NYC area", you mean "an hour south of New York City", right, since it's at least a 7-hour drive from within the city to Norfolk. Yes, you can drive faster than the speed limit (which is what MapQuest and Google use in their 7+ hour calculations), but you need to drive a lot faster to make up for the traffic you will likely hit unless you drive at night.
If you planned ahead, and had the relevant travel card, that price goes down to EUR79 (USD100).
That journey is a little over 6.5 hours on the train. You'd be lucky to do it under 6 hours driving, factoring in relevant breaks and depending on where in each city your arrival and departure point was. If I had anything to do at the other end, I know I'd much rather travel by train than bust my butt driving.
I regularly catch a tran from Vienna to Graz in Austria. The cost is around EUR18 one way, with discount card. The journey takes 2.5 hours by train, and maybe 2 hours by car, depending on the traffic. On the train I can read, work on my laptop, sleep, walk around, go to the dining car etc. It's a much more pleasant way to travel.
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OK, but what about AFTER the train would be complete? You have to keep spending those costs for your flight voucher system to work. Once the train is built it becomes cheaper.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
First, airlocks used in space are used a few dozen times at most before being completely overhauled. The docking connector on a train like this would get more than that much use in a single day, probably in a single morning.
If you're thinking of airlocks, then you'd have to depressurise and repressurise the train at every station. If you actually mean a tube connected to equal pressures outside of the tube and inside the train, then you're assuming that the seal of something that can be attached and detached, can handle one side moving as the train bounces up and down slightly as people step on and off, and still will have zero leakage.
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Throw enough ridiculously cheap fuel at them (and comparisons that ignore the cost of ownership), and almost anything looks worse than an automobile.
They won't work in any short distance travel. You would have traveled over 200 miles just by accelerating to 4000mph at 1G then stopping again at 1G. That's going to be pretty uncomfortable too. High speed trains get up to 0.1G. That's 30 minutes to get top speed. That's 1000 miles to get up to speed and stop again. Forget about doing any turns without the breakfast of your commuters on the side windows of the tube either. I think my calculations might be off on this one (because it seems ridiculous) but to achieve a comfortable 0.1G lateral acceleration, the turning radius would have to be 20,000 miles - this planet isn't big enough.
Amtrak. US passenger train service is owned by the US Government and is MASSIVELY subsidized.
Americans only like looking at trains and thinking to themselves "If it were more like my car I would love to ride a train."
Trains do not work in the US because of who Americans are.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I thought of the idea a while back, and I'm sure plenty of other people have too. It's really cool in a way, but I doubt it would ever be practical. The main problems I thought of:
Cost. It would have to be ungodly expensive by any measure, both to build and to operate. Could there ever be enough people willing to pay enough money to get, say, from NY to LA, faster than anything else to justify it? And it isn't very flexible either compared to air travel. If some other part of, say, NY, gets much more popular, then you can just build a new airport and reroute flights as needed. If you're using these giant vacuum tubes, you'd have to re-drill half of the run.
How tough it is to keep the tube in vacuum? We don't have any good way to estimate that now. Might need several high-grade vacuum pumps per mile that draw lots of power. It's pretty single-point-of-failure too - any significant air leak anywhere on the entire run, and any trains going fast enough to make such a system worth the trouble would probably be completely destroyed. It isn't just an air-resistance problem - unless the tube is much, much bigger than the train, then all of that air would be forced through the relatively small area between the train and the tube, thus much higher pressure spikes that would probably compromise any structure, and once you get the first crack, the whole thing will disintegrate real quick under the 6k MPH winds, leaving everything and everyone in the train as a stain on the walls over the course of a few hundred miles.
Handling sounds tough too. Like loading, unloading, servicing, turning them around, etc. You'd need lots of really good pressure seals that will stand up to many thousands of cycles with passengers doing all sorts of wacky things to them, and lots of elaborate procedures carefully followed. Getting trains into pressure for service (or do we have service techs in space suits?), loading and unloading passengers and cargo though some kind of airlock/jetbridge thing. Make a mistake anywhere, and you either pressurize the tube, destroying any trains travelling in it at the time, or suffocate all of the passengers in a train. Hope you never have a train break down in the middle of the line either.
I don't reply to ACs
Visit Japan and tell me their trains do not work.
And don't tell me "it's different in Europe". I was in Germany. I can drive from Munich to Berlin faster than the ICE train. And the train ride costs $150+ each way per person.
Berlin-Munich costs 44 Euros each way (you have to buy the ticket a few weeks in advance though), and takes 6 hours. Driving takes the same amount of time, and will cost you at least 50 Euros in gas (600 km * 5l/100km * 1.65 Eu/l = 49.5 ~ and that's a pretty efficient vehicle - you won't get that efficiency doing 160 on the autobahn). So you're just plain wrong. Not to mention, many routes are much faster than a car; Frankfurt - Gottingen takes 1h40m on the ICE and 2h30m by car.
You can't look at the "in station" ticket prices, that's just ridiculous... have you looked at the price of airplane tickets if you buy them at the airport??
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
You're assuming that there is no other way to spend the money on infrastructure that would have more benefits. How about adding a dozen more regional airports? Same effect, only doesn't cost tax payers on an ongoing basis.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You do realize that this article is about _trains_, right? You and your monomania are what brought space into the discussion. There's nothing impossible about a maglev train, nor a superconducting power cable, nor a depressurized tunnel. We already have all of these things. It may prove cost prohibitive to operate a train system like this.
Frankly, all that the article could really has to say about why such trains aren't being built is that they might be hard to maintain and everyone will die if it crashes. That and some completely hyperbolic speculation about one little leak almost immediately compromising the entire vacuum. So, basically, wow. Super-informative article. No really.
A concept like this has be studied since 1970 in Switzerland. The subject was more warm in the early 1990, with an idea of real experimentation, but cooled down when faced the complexity of the project and his hazardous profitability. There is still some trace of it on the web:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro
http://www.swissmetro.ch/en/home
Corners could also be a problem...
Build it in Afghanistan?
one word: VACUUM.
Two words: fire triangle
Two words containing a difficult one: fire tetrahedron
Before one will burst into flames one needs oxygen first. In a vacuum there is no hazard of bursting into flames. Remember this, and when you get your first physics lesson on combustion at school you will be mister smartypants!
If there is no oxygen, how on earth do you think the occupants of that vehicle are going to breath? You bet that such a train will need to carry oxygen, one way or the other. And in the event of a crash, that oxygen could be released into the vacuum, and there is your fire triangle, complete.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Those figures are based on a 20,000kg train. Those trains you mentioned were 4 to 9x that. That power also needs to be the forward thrust of the train. The magnets also need to lift it. Your power needs to also be transferred 1000's of kilometers so you've got a lot of transmission loss as well, unless you generate the power on board then you have the added weight of an engine, generator and fuel like a traditional train - which doesn't have to lift itself above a rail.
There is a small, but important difference between daydreaming and actually setting out to make something real with the technologies you have at your disposal. In the first case, you get the starship Enterprise movie. In the second case, you get the space shuttle Enterprise.
People were daydreaming about flying around for ages. Around the end of the 19th century, a whole body of junk science about how airplanes were supposed to fly had developed, resulting in a lot of money and effort wasted in unsuccessful airplane projects.
Alas, flight did not happen until the Wright brothers built a testing rig, threw out all the junk theories and designed something that could use technologies available at the time to actually take off.
Eureka doesn't simply happen from staring at your navel for many days.
You're coming from a point of view that doesn't suggest the airlines are subsidised as well.
Jonathanjk.com
I respectfully disagree, at least to some extent.
If there were no one daydreaming about the possibilities, no one would attempt the impossible. Thus it seems to me that the starship Enterprise is a necessary step towards achieving the space shuttle Enterprise, even as the space shuttle Enterprise is merely a rung on the evolutionary ladder to the starship Enterprise (there's a recursive conundrum for you, lol!).
Furthermore, compared to a lot of the other attempts at powered, manned, heavier-than-air flight, the Wrights followed a much more rigorous, evolutionary process towards their goals, which is one of the biggest differences between them and their predecessors (as well as many of their contemporaries). However, if you think that they threw out all of the thinking about flight that came before them, you are very much mistaken. Man had flown before Wilbur and Orville, even in heavier-than-air aircraft. Google Otto Lilienthal for an example (hint: what's the biggest, most obvious difference between a Cessna and a Blanik?). The Wrights took the collected knowledge of their day, tested numerous theories, and, as you said, "threw out all the junk" -- but they KEPT a lot of things, too. They had two big breakthroughs that had eluded others: first, they understood that for powered, sustained flight, you don't want the aircraft to be too stable because stable and controllable are diametrically opposed; second, they understood that turning an aircraft required redirecting part of the lift vector in a horizontal direction (i.e., turning requires banking rather than yawing). Basically, they were *excellent* examples of putting the scientific method into practice: observe, hypothesize, test, wash, rinse, repeat, and then take the one additional step that separates a scientist from an inventor, namely, build a practical device that makes use of the results of experimentation.
No, "Eureka!" doesn't happen from simply staring at your navel, but then again, I don't remember claiming otherwise. I merely pointed out that oftentimes, "Eureka!" is the result of approaching a problem from a different perspective. The "insurmountable" obstacles often aren't. They just require technology or knowledge that didn't exist earlier (wing warping, unstable airframes, and strong-enough-but-light-enough powerplants, in the Wright Brothers example or understanding that it is the equal and opposite reaction rather than exhaust gases pushing against the atmosphere in the rocket-in-a-vacuum example I mentioned earlier).
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
I see no difference between stating "I'll believe it's possible, we'll be able to build it!" and flatly stating "That can never be done." In most things I say, I qualify my statements: "I don't see how that will ever be possible, but..." That's a tacit acknowledgement that, at our current level of understanding, there is an obstacle that certainly appears to be insurmountable...but that could change eventually.
For example, you seem to have a pet peeve about ever colonizing space. I agree that with our current state-of-the-art, it won't happen. Chemical rockets can't achieve the kinds of velocities that are necessary to cross the vast distances between earth and even the nearest of stars (excluding the sun, of course). Einstein predicted that even an infinitely powerful engine wouldn't even be able to do so, due to the limiting factor of c. Consequently, yep, the outlook for colonizing space looks pretty bleak from here at the beginning of the 21st century. But neither you nor I know what kind of breakthroughs in physics are going to happen in the next hundred, thousand or even ten thousand years, any more than a Roman Centurion could have imagined the Internet or nuclear fission. It's probably safe to say that there won't be a physics breakthrough that allows us to actually accelerate a mass faster than the speed of light...but is there a way to avoid that limitation altogether? Will we figure something out that lets us sidestep the speed of light as a limiting factor? We don't know. Therefore, I take exception when people like yourself say something like space travel will "never" be possible. Never, as I am fond of telling my daughter, is a really long time. It's certainly a lot longer into the future than you or I will ever be able to see.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Trains do not work in the US because of what the US is.
Europeans always forget how incredibly tiny their nations are and how incredibly big the US is. Our population isn't bunched up into a few mega cities like yours is either and there is no reason it should have to be. Some people consider privacy to be more important than the infrastructure advantages in everyone being close together.
Suppose you built a high speed rail between LA and New York. Its fast, 200mph. So it can (ideally) cross the 2378.8 miles in a little under 12hrs if it makes no stops. Wonderful, its faster than I could drive it. But how now that I'm in new york, how do I get to the store that is 5 miles away from the station? Now that I am there, how do I get the shopping cart full of goods back to the train? Do I purchase another couple seats to store it? Will the train wait while I load and unload it? How do I get it to my home in a small town 50 miles from the station? What if my purchase included a piece of plywood and four 3m lengths of pvc for some basic work around the house? And if like many I do that every 3 days?
In the EU you might be considered extremely rural if you live 100km from the nearest reasonable point for a passenger station but it would be considered the suburbs here in the US. You'd have to go quite a bit further to reach rural.
That is the problem if you live in the major metropolitan areas and travel between them. Even stepping down from New York to something like Miami public transportation becomes far less practical and it isn't even on the menu outside metropolitan areas.
It is neither practical nor reasonable to expect the entire population to embrace city living. There are conveniences to be found in cities but the quality of life difference is comparable to factory farmed chickens in tiny quarters vs free range.
Personally I settle somewhere in the middle. Albuquerque. There is a pretty good bus system here but I still went through quite an effort to haul even a weeks worth of groceries, apartment/house/job hunting were a nightmare because things had to be within reasonable walking distance. First I broke down and got a scooter and then the list of things I couldn't carry on that scooter got too long and I got a car. The list of things I can't fit in the car on a regular basis teeters the line between justifying owning an SUV or truck. And that was living right downtown at the core of the transit system.
Sneaky Germans, always working and only buying things they can afford. I hate them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just because there aren't any new elements to be found in the periodic table suitable for new materials doesn't mean that we can't find new ways of arranging and linking those elements together to make better materials, like graphene.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene
When folks talk about Amtrak, one of the first comments is that it is subsidized. It is, to the tune of 2.6B a year at the current moment.
We spend approximately $150B a year in state and federal money on highway construction and maintenance.
We spend approximately $16B a year operating the FAA and airports, about 3.5B of which is directly spent on facilities construction and maintenance.
All transportation is subsidized. Cost per passenger mile, cost per trip, or other similar metrics are a far better measurement of financial performance. Passenger fairs are also a very interesting thing to look at, if the same subsidy for rail and airports resulted in fares that were 50% less for rail travelers that may be a better subsidy.
The problem in the US with rail is really simple to boil down. Congress mandates Amtrak serve underserved and out of the way communities. Greenwood Mississippi has Amtrak service because the government said they must go there, not because it is the best route, or the most profitable one. At the same time Congress wants Amtrak to be profitable. That's a combo that doesn't work. It could be a profitable service by aligning routes with where people wanted to go, and dumping unprofitable ones. It could serve underserved communities with a subsidy. It can't do both at the same time.
High speed rail is a long term investment problem in the US, and a problem of our red-tape with building things. The transcontinental railroad was built in 6 years, largely with hand labor. California's high speed line is estimated to connect San Francisco to LA by 2030, 18 years from now. Much of this is the ever evil "regulation", however much of that derided regulation is stuff the people voted for in the first place so we don't destroy our environment, and so on. Much of it is time taken up with legal challenges, large and small, wasting time and money in court. We have to take a hard look at this sort of problem, the US is now building infrastructure at a much slower rate than most other western countries, and that's not a way to stay ahead. We can't just throw out the regulations, that will not leave a functioning society, but we need to streamline many of these processes.
Trains can work just fine in the US, and they do in fact operate profitably in several locations today.
Unless you *find* the energy source, all you have is DREAMS. ... our energy base for the entire planet is decayed plant matter
Wait, where did all the nuclear reactors go?
How much is enough? How much should be enough?
It just so happens that we have the answer to this question: $75,000 per year per person is "enough".
I suppose that number will need to be adjusted periodically to account for inflation, the introduction of new tchotchkes from Apple, etc.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Most of health care expense is late-life, often just the last few weeks in a hospital's ICU. Figure $200,000 for two weeks before dying as a not unusual situation. Very little of that is drugs. It's very expensive tests using very expensive machines, very expensive very highly skilled labor, and 100% minimum hospital markup to compensate for deadbeats and lawsuits and screwups. Prescription requirements are an affront to common sense, but they're not 80+% of health care demand measured in dollars.
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Requiring that a large nation-wide train network that connects many rural areas be profitable is about as stupid as a shopping mall or office building requiring their escalator and elevator (or even toilet) divisions be profitable.
Such things are better run as cost centres. They must meet targets like safety, efficiency, availability, reliability, coverage, etc but I don't see why they must be profitable. If after the other targets are met and they are still profitable, that's icing on the cake.
First, airlocks used in space are used a few dozen times at most before being completely overhauled. The docking connector on a train like this would get more than that much use in a single day, probably in a single morning.
That doesn't seem likely, since you would only use a vacuum-tunnel/4000MPH train for long hauls. Like NY <-> LA. That trip would take about 40 minutes at 0.1G constant acceleration, IIRC.
The locks would be used at most once per hour or so.
If you're thinking of airlocks, then you'd have to depressurise and repressurise the train at every station. If you actually mean a tube connected to equal pressures outside of the tube and inside the train, then you're assuming that the seal of something that can be attached and detached, can handle one side moving as the train bounces up and down slightly as people step on and off, and still will have zero leakage.
You're assuming that the vacuum tunnel goes straight into the station. If I were designing the system, I would have the train go through a big airlock or two before getting to the station, so the last mile or so would be at full pressure, and the doors could be just like airplane doors (ie, they seal, but they don't have to attach to anything on the outside).
- The Sigless Wonder
"I'm not half as think as you drunk I am."
Yoda, is that you?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
And don't tell me "it's different in Europe". I was in Germany. I can drive from Munich to Berlin faster than the ICE train. And the train ride costs $150+ each way per person.
That's because they destroyed the excellent german state-owned train company for fame and profit. Seriously.
The Bahn ("The Train Company") was working just well when someone decided that private is always better and it needs to be sold off. They prepared for that for 10 years, during which time they closed many rural train stations, added high-speed trains to only the most profitable routes, and then sat back puzzled why the "long tail" of their economy was breaking away and only the high-speed trains were filled to and often beyond capacity.
Also, they doubled prices in just a few years.
Without corrupt and incompetent politicians, we would still have a system that works in Germany. Now you have to look to our neighbours, such as Switzerland, for a working train system.
Disclaimer: I live and work in Germany. For many years I had to travel all over the place on business. I took the train whenever possible because you can work on the train (1st class), you can't work in economy on a plane, and those two were what the company paid.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Congratulations, you are the 10%. Everyone else who has a cold can use WebMD.
The last two times I have been to a doctor, they have put my symptoms into a smartphone which kicked out a diagnosis, and they wrote me a prescription. It's such an utter waste. But they have an oligopoly. Can't have a medic with 6 months of training set a kid's broken bone. Can't even buy strong athlete's foot medication without giving them money.
If YOU have a severe condition, then YOU can go to the doctor. You gain nothing but higher bills by making everyone else go to the doctor for their piddly little conditions or straightforward procedures.
Don't get the truck.
You will spend the rest of you life having your weekends dedicated to moving friends.
Just go to Home Depot once in a while and rent their truck for $20 once every few months.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
If man was meant to fly, he'd have been given a big enough brain to design a 747.
Free Martian Whores!
Unless you *find* the energy source, all you have is DREAMS. ... our energy base for the entire planet is decayed plant matter
Wait, where did all the nuclear reactors go?
They blew up after exactly 50 years.
"Europeans always forget how incredibly tiny their nations are and how incredibly big the US is."
There are tiny states in the US. Your point? The overall area? Europe is just under 3.9 mil sq mi. The US is just under 3.8. Your point?
"Suppose you built a high speed rail between LA and New York. ... Now that I am there, how do I get the shopping cart full of goods back to the train? "
Does it happen often when you have to go to NY for shopping and then have to haul lots of stuff back? You live an interesting life.
"How do I get it to my home in a small town 50 miles from the station?"
How did you get to the station in the first place? Did you just materialize there?
"What if my purchase included a piece of plywood and four 3m lengths of pvc for some basic work around the house? "
Really interesting life...
"And if like many I do that every 3 days?"
Go to NY from LA, go on a shopping spree and go back? Paris, is that you?