The Concorde made day-trips US/Europe possible, but had to face the fact that there simply is no satisfying market for such high prices. And submarine vacuum trains would be much more expensive than a plane on steroids.
New York to London in an hour - by train
31–40 of 146 posts
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a more difficult target, just less of a damage multiplier, I suspect. Even in the high-speed train crashes of today deaths aren't too high. A train travelling at 2,500mph, however...
Really, how is this any different from airplanes? Just use equivalent security measures. Also, I wonder if it would be possible to have more frequent, smaller trains, e.g. airplane-sized. Then it doesn't seem like terrorism should be any "extra" consideration at all.
5 times the speed = 25 times the kinetic energy (per kg). And that is for the 'slow' one. At 4000mph, it is more like 64 times. And yes, this only talks of a 6-person capsule, but I think you would need to send quite a few of them through that tube to make it economically feasible. You wouldn't need to bring explosives to destroy the tunnel. Just have enough to have a 10 kg or so part drop from one of those capsules.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Daryl Oster's company has submitted proposals to Florida, at least, on building and maintaining a system such as this. I think part of the requirement for submitting such a proposal is at least a cursory cost analysis. Wikipedia reads a bit like the company wrote it itself, but: The firm fixed bid for the 96-mile (154 km) Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system was $253M, this was less than one tenth of the cost of the…
Would love to see how they costed that out. Given that I don't know of a single engineering company that can build straight up light rail track for at $2.5M/mile even if you give them the land for free. Edit: add this update -- Interestingly this link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/843626/posts claims that the ET3 bid was 1.2B$ which is $12.5M/mile which is a lot more credible (still low though since the s…
A large chunk of the costs of projects like this is building the long flat tunnel/level ground over significant distances. The actual costs of building a moderate vacuum is not that significant. Where this project falls down is in the maintenance and safety side of things not the infrastructure to send the first train down the line.
Don't forget every 10m adds 1atm water pressure. Building a glass enclosed under sea walkway 30m down is not that much harder than building one 20m down and these projects are going to be using glass.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#34I never have understood people's fears about getting on an airplane... this though I'd be scared to death of. You have any unfortunate shift in the tectonic plates (which happens daily and unpredictably) and you could be dead in an instant.
Speaking as someone who hates flying, it's not the general concept of death that scares me, but everything leading up to it.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#35The book title A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! has stuck to my memory. It's a 1972 SF (alternate history branch) novel by Harry Harrison, featuring a vacuum/maglev system.
More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_tunnel, including reference to Goddard patents on the subject.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#36I feel that the headline would be better if phrased as a question.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#37Good luck holding a vacuum under the ocean. I read stuff like this and I think, "Gee, I don't think these people have actually built anything." because if they had they would realize that if it costs $1M a foot too build subways [1] in cities with moderately skilled labor, its going to cost $10 - 25M/ft to build something like this. That's half a quadrillion dollars (448 trillion dollars). What sort or rate of return…
> It claims that it could “provide 50 times more transportation per kWh (kilowatt hour) than electric cars or trains,” that construction would cost a tenth of high-speed rail and a quarter of freeways
Who knows what this claim is based on, but it is there.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#38Much cheaper to go the suborbital flight route. Anywhere on earth to anywhere on earth in 2 hours.
Less infrastructure required. (And today anything requiring massive governmental infrastructure commitments is doomed to fail)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-point_sub-orbital_spac...
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#39This idea's been proposed on and off for some decades, and is definitely intriguing. The crucial problem, though, doesn't seem to be the technology per se (though there are undoubtedly large risks there, too), but the back-of-an-envelope economics being anywhere near sensible enough for someone to dedicate serious money to it. Before anyone is going to build a London-to-NYC line, my guess is that you'd have to first show some kind of much smaller-scale demonstration, like how there were test maglev lines built.
In a quick Google Scholar search, I turn up a 1974 article on "Surface-guided transport systems of the future" (http://dx.doi.org/10.1049/piee.1974.0277, unfortunately not open access), where evacuated-tube transport gets a mention, but under this less-than-enthusiastic banner:
A brief mention is given of other less likely transport systems, such as travel in an evacuated tube beneath or above the ground.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#40When that breaks, it's going to make a mess. 6 humans in, various bits of popped human coming out...