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Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

reuters.com

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Re: Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

#11

Post by Communitivity »

irrational wrote: post #4

When I think of WV, the main thing I think of is opioid addiction. Other than that and coal mining I don't really know anything else about WV. So, why WV?

WB has large expanses of area. It's already being renovated, look at the changes in my home town from 1979 to 2020 - it's gone from a quaint small town to a tourist destination and upscale DC suburb with the Clintons owning a home there ('One of America's Coolest Small Towns'-Budget America).

If this experiment works it might enable much more of WV to be considered a suburb of DC. That could be good or bad, but most likely both in different areas. It would definitely be profitable.

Re: Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

#13

Post by mac01021 »

irrational wrote: post #4

When I think of WV, the main thing I think of is opioid addiction. Other than that and coal mining I don't really know anything else about WV. So, why WV?

That's not a flattering impression of the state you have.

Anyway, WV is between NYC and DC, and there was a good site available for them to build their prototype.

Re: Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

#14

Post by jcranmer »

mac01021 wrote: post #13
irrational wrote: post #4

When I think of WV, the main thing I think of is opioid addiction. Other than that and coal mining I don't really know anything else about WV. So, why WV?

That's not a flattering impression of the state you have. Anyway, WV is between NYC and DC, and there was a good site available for them to build their prototype.

Uh... West Virginia is nowhere near the NYC-DC axis. It is potentially on the route between DC and Chicago, but most crayon maps would rather hook the Midwest into the Northeast Corridor by going via Pittsburgh, the Juniata water gaps, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia instead of picking a more southerly route that hits Baltimore or DC.

Re: Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

#16

Post by bigbubba »

Communitivity wrote: post #11
irrational wrote: post #4

When I think of WV, the main thing I think of is opioid addiction. Other than that and coal mining I don't really know anything else about WV. So, why WV?

WB has large expanses of area. It's already being renovated, look at the changes in my home town from 1979 to 2020 - it's gone from a quaint small town to a tourist destination and upscale DC suburb with the Clintons owning a home there ('One of America's Coolest Small Towns'-Budget America). If this experiment works it might enable much more of WV to be considered a suburb of DC. That could be good or bad, but most…

This is certainly what optimistic WV politicians what to believe, but unfortunately for them there is the problem of Hyperloop being a bunk gadgetbahn that won't pan out and was probably never meant to. (The true purpose of hyperlink, promoted by a man who sells cars, likely being to derail traditional highspeed rail proposals with "but if we wait N years we could build a Hyperloop instead!")

WV is being taken for a ride, but not the sort they hope for.

Re: Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

#17

Post by blisterpeanuts »

What kind of right-of-way would this system have? If it's sufficiently deep, would they need permissions from every land owner along the route, or could they just bore straight through 100m beneath the surface without affecting anything above ground?

>> "a trip between New York and Washington would take just 30 minutes"

Would be great, but I'd worry that they will never get the right-of-way to actually bore underneath these huge cities to convenient centrally located stations.

Re: Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

#18

Post by nickik »

I have to be honest, whenever I read a tech company with the name 'Virgin' in front, I believe that will spend huge amounts of money and not achieve much.

Virgin Galactic and Vrigin Orbit are both burning huge amount of money and have really not achieved much in relation to the amount spend.

However they are always big in the media and Branson is always mentioned along side of Elon Musk. As if Virgin Orbit and SpaceX are even remotely comparable.

As soon as the Hyperloop concept was shown, a company pops up doing it, again making sure the name Vrigin is always mentioned when Elon Musk Hyperloop comes up.

Their method and approach often seem more about big hype and big money raising. These companies also tend to find financing from big money people in the middle east, where with a lot of flash and not much substances you can finance. Virgin Orbit is public and promising intercontinental flight, system they are simply not able to develop by any evidence so far, its honestly borderline scamy.

This plan of spending 100s of million to develop a short test track seem like the same sort of thing. If it cost this much, how much will it cost from SF to LA?

> In a hyperloop system, which uses magnetic levitation to allow near-silent trave

In Elon Musk original hyperloop paper, he was explicit not using magnetic levitation.

Saying: "A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost associated with material and construction is prohibitive."

I hope of course they are successful, any attempted at developing new technology is great however I would never bet on them to achieve anything.

I still think the Hyperloop as described in the paper is mostly a good idea, but I think its smart of Elon to switch to tunnels. It makes the legal and safety situation way easier. I think the Boring company is actually developing a Hyperloop test track as well, but this is somewhat speculation at this point.

Here a link to the original paper:

- https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...

Re: Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

#19

Post by timerol »

peterwoerner wrote: post #8
soyiuz wrote: post #2

Hyperloop sounds like a bunch of hype. High speed trains are a thing already, as are MagLev trains, as are trains that go through tunnels, called the subway. The lack of their success in the US market has little to do with the technology itself and more to do with politics. The addition of vacuum tunnels does little to alleviate the administrative / financial challenges of our struggling train systems. Vacuum has few…

I think the goal with the vacuum is to get to even higher speed rail which can compete with airplanes for speed and convenience. The thought being, rail has to be clearly better than flying for it work. That said vacuum comes with many technical issues.

The Northeast Corridor is wildly profitable for Amtrak (based on operating costs), despite being significantly worse than flying, and often slower than driving. (It's faster than rush-hour driving, but that's about it.)

Making fast-enough rail that connects useful places, and upgrading the speed of existing rail that meets the same criteria, is a much better strategy IMO than trying to do "better than flying" rail based on unproven technology. Moonshots have their place, but America should try to catch up to the rest of the world in rail transport instead of pretending we're on the bleeding edge of innovation.

Re: Virgin Hyperloop picks West Virginia to test high-speed transport system

#20

Post by RobertoG »

yabones wrote: post #3

I'm very skeptical of this concept because of how difficult it is to build and maintain a massive vacuum chamber that will experience that level of stress over its lifespan. As far as I know, the largest vacuum chamber in the world by volume is the SPF at NASA [1], which is only 37x30m in size. Building such a vessel hundreds of kilometres in length that would have bullet trains going through it multiple times a day…

A hole in the tube would cause air coming in, isn't that the opposite of what that video[2] shows?
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