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Hyperloop Testing Starts Next Year
neanderslob writes: In 2013, Elon Musk told us about a theoretical transportation system he'd been thinking about for a while. It was called "hyperloop," and it was a tube-based system capable of sending people and things at speeds of up to 800mph. Now, a company called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies plans to start construction on an actual hyperloop next year. The idea is to build it to serve Quay Valley (a proposed 75,000-resident solar power city in Kings County, California). The project will be paid for with $100 million the company expects to raise through a direct public offering in the third quarter of this year. The track itself will be a 5-mile loop and won't reach anywhere close to the 800mph Musk proposed in his white paper — but it's a start.
Meaning the Boeing 747 became extremely popular while the Concord wound up eventually going to the dustbin of history because per passenger-mile, the Boeing 747 was cheaper than the Concord, despite taking much longer to move passengers from New York to London.
And that's the problem I see with the Hyperloop: sure, it may be technically possible to send passengers in a train in a tube with a vacuum at 800 miles per hour from Los Angeles to New York, but at the end of the day, its the cost per passenger mile that matters. And a large airplane traveling along at 500 miles per hour, which doesn't require 3,000 miles of dedicated hardware to travel through, is going to be far cheaper than buying a 3,000 mile strip of land and building a tube. across it.
Actually, it's the Return on investment (ROI) that matter in business. Or in other word, how many time it'll take to make enough profit to cover the cost of the initial investment. And in this case, the US$9.95 billion California High-Speed Rail is a huge example on how much money you can make on transportation.
If we take Elon Musk word, the ROI of the Hyperloop beat the crap out of any High-Speed Train project. But there's another term really important here, something we call Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL). Basically, this level told how much maturity a technology have reach. While HST is really high, Hyperloop on the other hand have a MRL really low. Meaning that nothing is proven about the real ROI of the Hyperloop and a huge R&D cost is needed to raise the MRL.
What I love about this is that they raised a sort of huge "kickstarter" to cover the cost of the R&D and raise the MRL to give us a real idea on the ROI of the Hyperloop. Only then we'll have an idea if Hyperloop will revolutionize the transport industry or not.
Elok
The new part is actually building it and trying it out.
Have we decided whether it will be blue or gold?
Just like North Haverbrook, Ogdenville, and Brockway.
It’s not a proof of concept, or a scale model. It’s the real deal. "It’s not a test track," CEO Dirk Ahlborn says [...]
Instead, this first prototype will test and tweak practical elements like station setup, boarding procedures, and pod design. [...] It’s also a way to prove that yes, this thing can be built.
Way to contradict yourself... Twice. Emphasis mine.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers. Note that even Musk's proposal isn't as far as you can take the concept. If you fill the tube with very low pressure water vapor instead of very low pressure air (via more pumping to overwhelm leaks, plus water vapor injection), your top speed jumps 40%. Fill it with hydrogen and it jumps 300% (normally hydrogen is a real pain to work with due to flammability, embrittlement, etc, but the densities in question are so low that such issues are mostly avoided). So we're talking the potential for hyperloop "speedways" for long distance runs that could blow airplanes out of the water.
The low numbers of passengers per capsule is really key to making the concept economical. Compare, say, monorail track with a full sized rail bridge. The former is vastly cheaper per unit distance because the peak loadings are so much lower, because the mass of the monorail trains are so much lower. A computer-controlled high launch rate of small, high speed capsules means you're spreading the loading out greatly, which means greatly reduced loading and thus materials costs.
Still, while Musk has been thinking of Hyperloop stations in the "airport" concept, he really needs to get out of that mindset. His proposed plan had them on the outskirts of cities. Airports are only on the outskirts of cities because they *must* be. You greatly reduce your utility by doing that, by making people catch connecting trains. Hyperloop can extend just fine into towns; with his two proposed endpoints in particular there are excellent rail routes into town that are quite straight that it could be built over.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
Actually, it's the Return on investment (ROI) that matter in business. Or in other word, how many time it'll take to make enough profit to cover the cost of the initial investment. And in this case, the US$9.95 billion California High-Speed Rail is a huge example on how much money you can make on transportation.
Using the $56 million per km quoted on California High-Speed Rail as the low estimate of how much it would cost to build a hyper loop, the minimum cost across the US would be $56 million per km * 3000 miles * 1.6 km per mile = $270 Billion dollars MINIMUM. That's going to have a hell of a long ROI, and because of that I can't see anyone in their right mind financing such a project in the near future.
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Actually, it's the Return on investment (ROI) that matter in business. Or in other word, how many time it'll take to make enough profit to cover the cost of the initial investment. And in this case, the US$9.95 billion California High-Speed Rail is a huge example on how much money you can make on transportation.
Using the $56 million per km quoted on California High-Speed Rail as the low estimate of how much it would cost to build a hyper loop, the minimum cost across the US would be $56 million per km * 3000 miles * 1.6 km per mile = $270 Billion dollars MINIMUM. That's going to have a hell of a long ROI, and because of that I can't see anyone in their right mind financing such a project in the near future.
Did Musk ever propose transcontinental hyperloops? I don't believe he did. As I recall this was always intended as a regional transportation technology, something for distances short enough that air travel is inconvenient because of the airport delays at both ends, but long enough that traditional train travel is too slow.
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Well at first, Hyperloop is aimed as a competitor to "regional airlines" and high-speed train. But if the Hyperloop is as cheap than what Elon Musk is thinking (about 1000% cheaper than HST), we can seriously consider coast-to-coast as a possibility.
Elok
I the cost of California High-Speed Rail, it's actually $68.4 billion for a the things as of 2011 estimate
As far as I can make out, the Hyperloop is a High Speed Railway inside a tube that structurally can take a vacuum. Plus things like airlocks to get in and out, and some very clever safety measures to allow people to escape in an emergency.
Yes, that has got to be cheaper than just a High Speed Railway, hasn't it?
$56M doesn't really apply here, even if we were talking about a transcontinental hyper loop. I don't know if you've ever driven across the country, but there is a whole lot of empty space. Building stuff there is significantly cheaper than where stuff already exists.
Maybe Musk thinks you can build a tube for less than $1422/inch ?
The usual way to determine if a project is making money is to subtract operating costs and the amortized portion of construction costs from operating revenue - and to date the unbuilt California High-Speed Rail system has precisely zero operating revenue. It's projected to make money (according to it's backers), but projections aren't revenue.
It also depends on the cost of the alternatives. The California Highspeed Rail from SF to LA, currently under construction, is projected to cost $500,000 per seat to build. Even if the ticket prices are heavily subsidized (and they will be) they will have to be very high to recover that expense.
I take a lot of that back. Apparently I know fuck all about what a hyper loop actually is. It is not a hard vacuum at all.
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It's bizarre hype. The articles I've read have quoted the project leaders as claiming this is the real thing, followed by a claim that it's a small scale prototype to test the concept. Uh. OK. Not what most people would say is the "real thing", but whatever.
I'd be more enthusiastic about the project if it didn't appear to be solely a dishonest attempt to kill a high-speed rail project, by claiming an unproven, non-existent, technology that, if implemented as proposed, would only link up two of the four cities CAHSR joins, has a fraction of the capacity, would have a total travel time (that is, downtown to station to station to downtown) that's longer than CAHSR's, is "cheaper". Amazingly enough, CAHSR would cost much less if it didn't have to do those things either.
Which is a shame because I shouldn't be looking at the ugly agenda behind the project. It'd be nice to see it in isolation, as a concept that could join cities in future.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The problem with maglev is it's *expensive* - every mile of rail needs not only a better-than-normal-rail foundation to survive the stresses of high-speed transit (maglev only eliminates the high-frequency vibrations), but also a "track" of either extremely powerful permanent magnets, or an active maglev system. And reliabilty must be *extremely* high, since losing power for even a second means your high-speed train is going to cease to levitate and tear up a goodly length of expensive track, in addition to probably destroying itself and its passengers.
Hyperloop on the other hand is basically just a length of vacuum tubing on stilts, with occasional vacuum pumps along its length to compensate for leakage, and magnetic "mass drivers" wherever there's need for a speed change - all the rest of the cleverness is in the cars themselves, which float on a cushion of air like an air-hockey puck. And anything but the most catastophic of failures will result in the cars coasting to a stop as the air density in the tube gets too high to support their speed. Between the technical simplicity of the tubes, and the long stretches between pylons where the ground doesn't need to be prepared at all, Hyperloop track is potentially cheaper per mile to construct than rail, even in rural areas, and in urban areas rail can't begin to compete.
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The HyperLoop Elon proposed was estimated to cost 1/10th of the LA-SF CHSR project, but it only had 1/10th of the capacity.
Unlike the CHSR project, the proposed HyperLoop project actually only connected the outskirts of LA to the Oakland bay, leaving out the expensive part of going to downtown LA and downtown SF.
The estimated HyperLoop projects assumed they save on expropriations by placing the track elevated over existing highways.
But to travel at 800 mph without making your passengers sick and barfing, the route actually needs curves to be 16 times as smooth as the 200 mph CHSR.
The estimated HyperLoop costs were low by an order of magnitude even when comparing to known costs of elevated track and even of oil pipelines. Let's not even talk about the actual precision needed to make this work at 800 mph.
No, putting track on pylons even for normal trains is quite expensive. That alone will cost tens of billions of dollars using existing elevated rails in California as comparison. Then there is cost of this magic piple, oil pipelines cost $5M to 6M per mile and they are MUCH narrower than hyperloops. So real cost will be over $100 billion, Musk is off by more than order of magnitude.
High speed railway is *phenomenally* expensive. It requires massive earthworks because of the very limited turning radius and limited climb angle of high speed trains. It requires very specialised rails that have to be laid under very high tension and welded so that the result is seamless and can withstand large temperature variations. It's also much more expensive to ballast because normal ballast doesn't cusion things well above certain speeds and turns into nasty pebbles instead of spikey lumps of rock. The result is big and heavy which means it needs its own strip of dedicated land. Finally, the air resistance for high speed rail grows quickly. On the very high speed test trains it gets comparable to aircraft. Despite having a smaller frontal area per passenger mile, the trains go fast in the thick lower atmosphere. The costs of those things add up a lot.
The hyperloop system claims to solve some of them and long, large airtight pipes are also well established technology in the oil industry for pipelines.
Whether or not the hyperloop claims are valid, I don't know, but it's not as wild as it first seems.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But to travel at 800 mph without making your passengers sick and barfing, the route actually needs curves to be 16 times as smooth as the 200 mph CHSR.
You can save some by using tilting trains: they can go around much tighter curves at speed than regular trains with a low barf-factor.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"Existing elevated rail" is not a valid comparison. The Hyperloop infrastructure needs to support about 1/10th the weight per meter as traditional rail, therefore it can be done with 1/10th the materials. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline is 36 inches in diameter; the Hyperloop would be about 100 inches, but hollow and empty most of the time. Oil pipelines are full of oil, therefore quite heavy relative to diameter. In practice the total weight per linear meter of oil pipeline vs Hyperloop is about the same; 1 metric ton per meter. Traditional elevated rail is about 10 metric tons per meter.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
You can also tilt the track, canting in railway terms.
Canting in normal railway lines is limited due to the need to handle slow trains, but on high speed rail it's often allowed to be higher.
That's why it's uncommon to use tilting trains above 250 km/h: it's usually preferable to tilt the track than to increase the weight of trains by adding tilting systems.
Though the Japanese have some.
That said, "much" is a relative statement, Whether you tilt the train floor or the track the accelerations experienced by the passenger
- lateral: is v^2/r - g*sin(tilt_angle); acceptable limit is +/- 0.1g
- vertical: 1g + v^2/r * cos(title_angle); limit is 1g+/-0.05g, IIRC
As you can seen from the math, the problem increases with the square of speed, while the benefit from tilt is is limited and bound by the need to keep both lateral and vertical acceleration within bounds.
You have to be a special kind of idiot to ignore the general success that HSR projects have had across the world. CAHSR isn't a perfect project, it's plagued by politics and would probably cost a fraction of the price if they didn't have to get buy in from 51% of the State.
But profitable? Why wouldn't it be? Acela Express, a relatively crappy HSR system that manages an average speed of 70mph gets half a billion dollars a year in revenues, an amount that's still increasing year-on-year. It has around 80% of the Air-Train market it serves.
There's no reason to believe that CAHSR, a faster "purer" system, wouldn't make more money than Acela Express. And the infrastructure doesn't have to be limited in use to just the four stops currently covered.
It's not perfect, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good enough. I'd prefer a private project, but looking at the progress of the all-private All Aboard Florida in Florida, I'd say the problems with politics fucking everything up and virtually coercing good projects to do crappy things are going on there too. Texas's HSR is similarly being attacked by NIMBYs in those areas it passes through but doesn't serve. It'll be interesting to see how all three projects progress.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"The Hyperloop infrastructure needs to support about 1/10th the weight per meter as traditional rail, therefore it can be done with 1/10th the materials." No, doesn't work that way. The supports would need to anchor something that can't even be allowed to move a millimeter lest the passengers be jarred to death.
Vacuum tubes of miles in length, smooth to extremely high tolerances, will be far more expensive than oil pipes.
$500k actually sounds pretty cheap per seat. Even the lowest estimate of use put forward by critics of the project was 23M passengers/year. To pay for construction in the first year each passenger would need to generate $43 in profit over running costs. Realistically they could charge much less and still turn a profit in a reasonable time.
Japan is currently building a maglev high speed "rail" line between Tokyo and Osaka. 86% of it will be tunnels through extremely challenging terrain. Initial speeds will be 550km/h, rising to around 900km/h in time so somewhat similar to the hyperloop proposal.
The cost in very, very high. Far higher than what the US is paying. It's new technology and it's difficult terrain. The pay-back time is going to be long. Decades before it shows a profit. The thing is, Japan Rail is in it for the long haul. That line will be running indefinitely. The current ones started in 1964, more than 50 years ago. The tickets are reasonably priced and the volume of passengers will be high. It's much, much faster than flying and much, much cheaper. The technology itself is valuable, and will be exported to other countries.
Oh, and pollution is much lower and from flying. It's safer too. There really is very little not to like.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As someone else already mentioned, it uses low pressure air because the "trains" are ground-effect aircraft, not maglev. They need air.
Secondly, the pumping budget to overcome leaks is so small, both in terms of capital and ongoing costs, that you could increase them by an order of magnitude and not have any sort of practical effect on the budget. Whatever factor you increase over the baseline increases the factor you can replace air by. You don't need 100%.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
'the Hyperloop is a High Speed Railway"
Nope. Rail is heavy and thus mostly must reside on the ground
There are things called viaducts and tunnels. A lot of modern high speed lines are built with one or the other. Japan's in particular are largely elevated, and much of the UK Channel Tunnel link line through south east England is in tunnel. And if the railway (sorry "non-railway Hyperloop" if you picky about semantics) is not "heavy" it will not be carrying many people, an equivalent to Concorde in the airline world; as such it won't be solving many people's transport problems.
and thus cuts everything in half along its path
There are things called bridges.
Look, you Amercans seem to make very heavy weather of railways "cutting things in half". It seems that for historical reasons, when a railway was built in the USA, the upper classes all settled on one side of the tracks and the lower classes and industry on the other. So the town grew up "cut in half", joined by multiple level crossings which are forever a source of frustration and delay. I have a picture in my mind of the train rolling through a city on a dead-straight track at ground level at the end of "Back to the Future Part III" - such a scene is essentially American and I cannot think of a layout like that in the UK. In Europe railways fit in much more comfortably. In the UK you are practically unaware of the existence of railways (many people are) unless you use them. Even farm tracks have their own private bridges or underpasses. In the centre of Birmingham for example you can be totally unaware that there is the biggest station UK outside London beneath and around you, and most of it is not even underground.
and hampers if not stops any traffic along its path.
Along its path ?? I don't get it.