Slashdot Mirror
South Korea Signs On To Build Full-Scale Hyperloop System (newatlas.com)
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) has partnered with the South Korean government and local universities to build the world's first full-scale Hyperloop system. "The agreement was actually signed back in January but only revealed this week, and sees HTT team up with the South Korean government's department of technological innovation and infrastructure, along with the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building (KICT) and Hanyang University," reports New Atlas. From the report: It involves the construction of a full-scale testbed, licensing of HTT's vacuum tube, levitation, propulsion and battery technologies along with the co-development of safety standards and regulations. The agreement is a multi-year partnership intended to build a new transportation system for South Korea, one which will be known as the HyperTube Express and carry passengers between Seoul and Busan in under 20 minutes, compared to the current three-hour drive. HTT may be setting out to build the world's first Hyperloop but it is no guarantee, with fellow startups Arrivo and Hyperloop One also moving full-steam ahead with their plans. The latter in particular seems to be making solid progress, recently showing off a full-scale test track in Nevada and forming agreements with Russia, Finland and Dubai to explore the feasibility of a Hyperloop in those countries. It's too early to tell who will be first out of the gate, but the competition is certainly heating up.
That's not in the slightest "how they're selling it". Read the design document. To reiterate that which for some inexplicable reason has to be repeated in every thread about Hyperloop: the Hyperloop Alpha design:
* Is not a pneumatic tube
* Is not a vacuum train
* Would not even work in a hard vacuum
* Is not maglev
* Is a ground-effect aircraft / air-bearing suspended vehicle in a highly rarified atmosphere, utilizing a battery-powered compressor to shunt the air built up ahead of the vehicle to the suspension and behind the vehicle.
Your failure to read anything about how it works is nobody's fault but your own.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
The expansion joints thing is just another example of why you don't turn to a biochemist for a lecture on engineering. Most HSR doesn't have expansion joints either. Lots of things don't have expansion joints. There are three standard ways in industry to deal with thermal expansion: 1) resist it, 2) let it expand by increased bend radii, 3) let it expand by increased linear length. All three are widely used. In HSR, it's common practice to use the "resist" approach - they generally lay the track hot, so that when it cools it contracts and there's built-in tension on all but the hottest days. They usually use heavy and/or anchored ties (commonly concrete) to resist track movement. Pipelines generally use some combination of #1 (e.g. overburden anchoring), #2 (e.g. expansion loops) or #3 (e.g. slip-type expansion joints). Hyperloop wants to use #3, with the dampers as slip joints (e.g. like teflon shoes on pipelines). Whoop-de-doodle-doo. Even if that sort of thing wasn't already a common solution for thermal expansion, they could always just switch to resisting expansion, with a pretensioned tube, like the rail on HSR.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
It's basically how (and when) the rail systems have grown up, partnered and died over time.
Additionally, the northern states have generally been more industrialized, leading to "outsized" growth of rail systems there.
Chicago, when the rail lines were first coalescing, was a natural economic hub into the west and generally right on the demarcation line of what was The United States and the western territories. St. Louis also shares this to a certain extent. Heading south from there, the next major east-west hub would have been Memphis. And while it IS a transport hub, it's still a Johnny-Come-Lately due to the aforementioned dichotomy between industrialization in the north vs the south.
Additionally, for a while, every railroad venture was building on its own gauge of track. By the middle of the 19th century, there had been a major push towards a standard gauge. Current standard gauge (Stephenson gauge, international gauge or normal gauge) is 1435mm (4'8" in the US) distance between the inside of each rail. And it's used in roughly 55% of the world's track systems.
Again, the south, being behind, especially after the US Civil War was still mired in competition between rail lines. So businessmen didn't want their equipment potentially falling into the hands of rivals. So the proliferation of non-standard gauges continued MUCH longer. And because of this, lack of standardization, replacement parts were orders of magnitude more expensive. Because they had to be built on-spec, rather than just being pulled from a standard parts bin. This expense eventually became unmanageable and rail lines in the south started dying off.
What routes existing in the southern US now are either relative new builds or are legacies of rail line builders who settled (or just happen to have built) on/near standard gauge.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
A huge amount of freight in Europe goes via sea and rail too. In fact there are many large distribution centres that are supplied by rail. A lot is then transferred to road because that ends up being more efficient currently than sending one container load down a branch line, and. commuters don't want mixed trains and delays to have freight containers removed. If it was possible to unload during a station stop (two or three minutes) without much investment you might see even more rail transport.
I helped design submarines. Big, long metal tubes which can withstand well over 50 atmospheres of external pressure. Designing a tube to withstand a single atmosphere is trivial.
And you don't design these things to be uniform in strength so if it fails, the entire cross-section buckles killing everyone inside. You deliberately design them with weaker sections. That way if there's ever a problem, a weaker section fails first and (for a submarine) gives the crew advance warning the hull is about to fail while allowing them time to recover, or (for an airplane or hyperloop) equalizes the pressure before the entire structure can fail.
I think Hyperloop is a boondoggle in California. But I could actually see it working for South Korea. They have an extremely high population density (lots of potential customers), the maximum travel distance in the country is annoyingly too short for airliner but too long for regular passenger trains, and the geography is incredibly stable (no earthquakes).
Background discussion: "The US should use more rail / should be more like Europe."
Me: "The US has the biggest and most efficient rail system on the planet; you simply don't notice it because it's all freight. European rail systems are less efficient because they use part of their system for passenger transport."
You: "European industry likes inefficient modes of transport!"
Wow, great argument you have there!
In addition, it is the mix of passenger and rail traffic that is causing frequent freight delays in European rail traffic in the first place, because passengers cannot be "railroaded" for a day or two, so they always take priority. On top of that, passenger traffic requires expensive and inefficient high speed trains.