Hyperloop One Reveals Its Plans For Connecting Europe (engadget.com)

Hyperloop One has revealed its plans for connecting Europe via its Hyperloop transportation system that can move passengers/cargo at airlines speeds for a fraction of the cost of air travel. The company is currently considering nine potential routes in Europe, "running from a 90km hop to connect Estonia and Finland, through to a 1,991km pan-German route," reports Engadget. "The UK [...] gets three proposes routes: one to connect its Northern Cities, one to connect the North and South, and one to connect Scotland with Wales." From the report: Several of the routes, including ones between Estonia and Finland, Corsica to Sardinia and Spain -- Morocco, all cross bodies of water. The company has, on several occasions, spoke of its love of tunnels, and plans to use them extensively in construction. Although rather than using tunneling machines, which can be slow, submerged box tunnels or archimedes bridges may be cheaper and faster to build. CNBC notes that the proposals for Europe connect more than 75 million people in 44 cities, spanning 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles).

Comments

Cross rail, Channel Tunnel

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a train in a tunnel but with air sucked out of it. So the difference between a high speed train tunnel and this is the air suckage.

So its put all the energy into keeping the air sucked out, instead of pushing the train against the air.

But the air is a known problem, in the Channel Tunnels it's handled with vents connecting the two direction tunnels, they open and close so the pressure wave from the front of one train pushed the train in the other direction from behind. Chunnel is not watertight let alone air tight.

So if you consider the costs of the Channel Tunnel GBP 9.5 billion for 31 miles of track, and the price.... the Chunnel competes with boats that are slow and expensive, a normal train has to compete with cars, coach, normal rail and flights.

So say low interest 3% government loan, so that 31 miles of track needs to return GBP 285 million profit. Eurotunnel makes only about 51 million, and that's competing only against ferries.

So hyperloop is basically hype. They cannot deliver on any of these ideas and their costings are comedically bad.

Re:Cross rail, Channel Tunnel

[RotateLeftByte]

The fast trains between London and Paris (2hours city centre to city centre) has cut the number of flights dramatically between london and paris. More people are travelling between them now than ever before.
The tunnel (road traffic) competes against the ferries. The Passenger tail service from London to Paris, Brussels etc competes against the airlines.
I took the train from London to Avignon last year (a through service). Very much more civilised way of travelling than by air. Yes it took a bit longer but was far less stressful.

have to be cheap as pie to make it.

[gl4ss]

they will have to be cheap as pie between finland and estonia.

I seriously hope that finnish government doesn't put a dime towards this though. it's still unproven as fuck. they don't have a prototype. giving money towards a tunnel would be shady as fuck. furthermore, estonia - finland route is so fucking short that regular train going 200kmh would do just fine, just fine, if there was a tunnel.

and they have to be cheaper than 20 euros for a trip. which is basically cheaper than a comparable train route in finland. why? boats between finland and estonia are pretty darn cheap and will get you there in couple of hours anyways(!).

Re:Wait in line

[Kiuas]

Linking Finland and Tallinn is a perfect application for this. There are already fleets of ferry ships linking the two, as it's an exceedingly popular route.

Yes, linking us here in Helsinki to Tallin with a tunnel may be smart. However, using Hyperloop to do it makes no sense to me as a Finn that travels to Estonia several times a year. Why? The travel time on the fastest ferries is already down to below couple hours, and they're currently looking into the option of building a rail tunnel in between the cities. which would cut the travel time down to 45 minutes. Benefits of a rail system over something like the hyperloop at this point are enormous: first off, trains are a technology we have mastered and the project does not require maintaining a near-vacuum, second of all trains have a higher capacity than hyperloop and are very likely cheaper to maintain*.

The Hyperloop test track which was about a mile long is so far the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in the world after NASA's. The Hyperloop tech is probably on the order of decades from being commercially viable. Even the planning of a regular underwater tunnel takes years, the estimated completion time of the rail tunnel is in 2038. Infrastructure projects like this take massive amounts of time and money to plan an execute and the planning needs to be started years in advance so it's near impossible that a technology like Hyperloop in such an early stage of innovation will even be considered for the Helsinki-Tallin route. The upsides are not worth the increased risks.

Even the rail tunnel is not a certainty due to the cost factors involved. At 92 kilometers - nearly twice the English channel tunnel - It'd be the longest rail tunnel in the world and underwater, making it extremely expensive (current estimates are in the ballpark of 13 billion euros). With the ferry traffic being cheap (you can get tickets for less than 10 euros), plentiful and fast it may well be the case that the tunnel is never implemented. Not to mention that the ferry companies are major players in the baltic regional economy, and this wield significant political lobbying power both here and in Estonia. Tallink-Silja is one of the largest companies in the Baltics, coming 2nd or 3rd behind only banks.

So to summarize: would it make sense to establish a faster connection between Helsinki and Tallinn? Possibly, I'll wait for more info before saying that for sure. If it is done, what are the chances of hyperloop being used to do it? Practically zero.

Re:Good luck in the UK

[nukenerd]

I can't see this happening in the UK fortunately

FTFY

Whilst hyperloop may be orders of magnitude cheaper per route km ...

Lay off the Kool-aid if I were you. Why should a railway in a vacuum tunbe be cheaper to build than a railway not in a vacuum tube? (Yes, yes, I know Musk and his fans don't like it called a "railway". OK, "Guided public transport", whatever).

In fact it will involve far more expensive civil engineering because at its speed the curvature in both horizontal and vertical planes will need to be very very gentle - much more so than with conventional railways. So expect either mostly tunnels, or massive cuttings and viaducts. Those support pylons, that people keep glossing over as if it were a contour-hugging oil pipe, will need to be hundreds of feet high in some places.

Except that...

[DrYak]

so guess what the result of those negotiations is going to be? exact same as it is now.

Except that now UK isn't part of the EU and doesn't have anything to say anymore about its politics.

UK went from a full blown EU member, to probably the same status as Switzerland and Norway, two countries who were never members of the EU to begin with, and just sign treaties to be able to participate anyway.

Basically, UK just lost its voice at the EU table - its share of sovereignty.

Which sounds ironic, when a good chunk of the campaign's argument was something along the lines of "we want to be in charge of our own".

--

Or, UK could decide to go bonkers, completely sever ties with EU, and apply a request to be accepted as the 51st state of the USA.
Airstrip One. :-)