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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).
I can't see this happening in the UK unfortunately. It's notoriously difficult, time-consuming and mind-bendingly expensive to obtain the land and permissions to build any new transport infrastructure corridors in the UK. The Rail lines High-Speed Route 1 was bad enough and High Speed Route 2 is bogged down in inquiries, corruption and phenomenal cost projections. High Speed Route 2 is 400km and is sitting at a cost of 56 billion pounds which will be well south of the final bill. Whilst hyperloop may be orders of magnitude cheaper per route km the fun and games in getting the land will be the same. And no, you can't put it in the air on pylons as "air rights" belong to the land holders too. Land ownership in the UK is incredibly fragmented so even a short distance means engaging with thousands of land holders. One approach would be to piggy back down the middle of major arterial roads on pylons as most trunk roads are now owned by the Crown although that's not a hard and fast rule - many minor roads sit on land still theoretically owned by someone else.
It is still impossible to go from say Vienna to Kharkov by train easily. Not even possible to buy a train ticket Vienna-Kharkov easily, - just as it was twenty years ago. A lot of talk about "European Integration", but nothing really changes on the ground.
I do not believe that the Hyperloop One is feasible with this generation of quaint leadership in Europe. They can just talk big and well about climate change, integration, etc.
Still in the 19th century there was the St. Petersburg-Wien-Nizza-Cannes-Express regular train https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , there were no visas, and not even passports were necessary for travel. WW1 destroyed it all and we are still stuck there.
They can always run the existing trains faster, they just don't like the wear on the tracks.
If people want the hyperloop experience they can always just make one of the cars a lot smaller and take the window out.
Come to think of it, if the train cars rode closer to the rails and were half the height they could probably just run the whole train 50% faster
Nullius in verba
You know, you could actually RTFM (in this case, TFM = Hyperloop Alpha) rather than being bewildered as to why.
The short of it: it's basically a pipeline, so you start with base pipeline costs for the given diameter. Compared to a pipeline:
Advantages:
* Far lower mass loadings
* Does not carry things that could "leak" and contaminate the ground (much easier environmental permitting, less NIMBY)
* Simpler thermal management
* Much lower pumping requirements (just to head this off: it's a mild vacuum, not a hard vacuum. The energy required (and pump sizes) to pump fluids through a pipeline is far more than is required to simply maintain a mild vacuum)
* Usually periodic branch points
Disadvantages:
* Far greater straightness requirements
* Requires an internal orbital polisher
* Periodic emergency exits
Both share infrastructure requirements at their endpoints, just of different kinds, both require a leak detection process, both require regular sensors, both require earthquake protection, etc. In general, however, pipeline construction is not very expensive, even at large diameters, relative to rail construction. The ready-made pipe segments are brought to the site and an orbital welder connects them together.
Versus rail, Hyperloop offers far lower peak mass loadings. This is because (and feel free to do the math yourself, I have) in both cases, the "track" - whether continuously-welded steel rails or orbital-welded pipe, is well lighter than the vehicles on them, but Hyperloop vehicles - being small with frequent launches rather than heavy with infrequent launches - provide far lower mass loadings. The cost of elevating a structure is directly proportional to its peak mass loadings, and hence the order of magnitude lower peak mass loadings translates to an order of magnitude lower elevation cost, as well as smaller cross section pylons which are easier to locate in tight spaces.
This in turn enables the practical location of it in road medians (with proper crash barriers as needed), if you have government buy-in to the concept. Hyperloop Alpha assumes that you will. I have to concur, it's hugely to the advantage of the government to do so, as the government has to spend huge amounts of public money building transportation infrastructure regardless. Road medians are already permitted for far more onerous environmental and noise conditions (road traffic) than Hyperloop would provide, which should make permitting much easier; the only new thing you're introducing is visual, which you have to introduce for any transportation system construction.
Due to the straightness requirements, the system cannot just stay within road medians. Varying bend radii depending on the speed planned for the segment require various deviations from medians. This requires private land acquisition - budgeted at typical rail rates for private land acquisition - and various tall pylons and/or short tunnel segments (budgeted at typical pipeline tunneling rates) where the landscape dictates it in order to maximize curve radii. And yes, they are typical rates, I've crosschecked the numbers in the document, and encourage you to as well.
Now as for the rest as to why it's so much cheaper than rail, they do cheat on that. There's three main ways. The first is simple: it doesn't carry as many people as California's HSR (it's roughly halfway between HSR and air travel on a logarithmic scale in terms of passenger capacity). That's not really a cheat on the per-passenger cost, but it is a cheat on th
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.