What could possibly go wrong?
New York to London in an hour - by train
71–80 of 146 posts
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get a pushbike. Persuade everyone you know to get a pushbike. Make them persuade everyone they know to get a pushbike. Start a campaign for people to only use their cars if they i) Have to or ii) are travelling over 10 miles. Make workplaces have facilities for cyclists. (Perhaps going as far as treating car-parking spaces as a taxable perk). Make schools have facilities for cyclists. Make shops have facilities for c…
There is a river in between. You would need to bike up to the George Washington assuming he lives in Hoboken and commute to Midtown. Either way you go from a 45 minute commute to maybe a 2-3 hour commute if you are lucky. Even worse since now using a bike his commute is ~20 miles instead of the 4 in the first place.
Excuses... I don't even live in NYC and yet it took me 1 minute to find a better option: take the ferry (bikes are allowed). http://goo.gl/maps/ssB0.
I bet on a good day you can cycle this route under 30 minutes including the ferry ride.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#73Good 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…
Indeed, there's already a vacuum we already have above our heads that could be used for this purpose... i.e., suborbital space flight. I can't imagine it'd be more expensive than tunneling 3000 miles under an ocean.
For varying hardnesses of vacuum, you can find a partial vaccum of 4 psi at 30,000 feet.
Which is enough to drop drag a lot, and still maintain lift in, say, commercially viable air transportation vehicles.
Lowest costs I've seen to LEO are about $1,000/lb. Suborbital flight isn't much lower than that, and we're still looking at something on the order of $10k - $1m per passenger at rates like that. Affordable to some, but (considering you've likely got a baggage, life support, and related allowance) pretty pricey all the same.
$10k is comparable to Concorde, as I recall. I consider that a very optimistic estimate.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
How the hell does light rail track cost $2.5M/mile? How did people build railroad tracks back in the days of horses and buggys?
That is a great question, I wish I could reasonably answer it. I'm a big fan of rail, and while San Jose was celebrating their first 4 miles of light rail (in just 10 years from the start of the project!) I was looking that the marker in the Sacramento Rail museum (recommended) commemorating the laying of 10 miles of the Union Pacific rail line in one day . Part of it is that some folks really hate rail, so much so t…
Great response.
>San Jose was celebrating their first 4 miles of light rail (in just 10 years from the start of the project!)
> Actual work days might be 90 for a mile of track, but time actually passed is like a year
So currently, San Jose can build 0.25 mi/year. Optimistically, with no lawsuits, their actual work days could increase to say, 225 days/year, which is 2.5x faster. So we're up to say, 0.66 mi/year, which still sounds way too low. What are the other bottlenecks?
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#75Link to the BBC article instead of the blogspam: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120601-high-speed-pipedrea... Also, easy terrorist target.
What makes current train system a more difficult target than these tubes?
Scale of attack, amount of force required, social and economic impact of the accident.
Look over a list of who the victims of the Titanic disaster were -- comparable in that it was the luxury travel alternative of its day. Jay Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Ida Straus (founder of Macy's), just to name a very few. The societal impact of the Titanic's loss was ... titanic.
You wouldn't even need an explosive to foil the tube. Simply something to perturb the system slightly would disrupt it in a bad way. Even if only a single small transport were in the vicinity, any others in the tube would also be doomed (granted, at 1 hour/trip, headways would likely limit this to a very few instances).
Trains are very robust. Conventional high-speed rail is a bit riskier, but even accidents such as on the German Eschede rail disaster (at 200kph) saw over 60% of the passengers survive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschede_train_disaster
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#76Much 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...
Cheaper? You have much greater energy losses from atmospheric drag, firing hot gas out of your back end is far less efficient method of acceleration than electromagnetic propulsion, and you can use regenerative braking.
In theory setting this up should be much cheaper than high volumes of suborbital flights.
Of course neither is actually feasible.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there some reason that sandwiching air between the evacuated tube and the water wouldn't work? Granted it would add to the cost. The ocean depth point is interesting. The article says "engineers would tether the tunnel at a fixed depth." I take this to mean tethering to the bottom and relying on buoyancy to keep the tunnel floating at the right depth, which presumably could be 30m or so.
>Is there some reason that sandwiching air between the evacuated tube and the water wouldn't work? Yep, because now you've just got your air rushing into the vacuum through the cracks, instead of water. The ocean depth point is interesting. The article says "engineers would tether the tunnel at a fixed depth." I take this to mean tethering to the bottom and relying on buoyancy to keep the tunnel floating at the right…
>Yep, because now you've just got your air rushing into the vacuum through the cracks, instead of water.
Fair enough. I imagine there's a trade-off between the quality of the tunnel materials and the number of pumps needed along the way, assuming an imperfect vacuum is good enough.
I'd be worried about flexibility too. Skyscrapers do pretty well in high winds and earthquakes, so I'm not completely convinced that a similar effect isn't possible with an underwater tube. Any bending would have to be extremely gradual, though, if there's any hope of shooting something through it at high speeds. I agree that glass isn't going to cut it.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#78When that breaks, it's going to make a mess. 6 humans in, various bits of popped human coming out...
At 4000 MPH? There probably wouldn't be anything left. The kinetic energy in a train going that fast would likely have military scale destructive power.
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a river in between. You would need to bike up to the George Washington assuming he lives in Hoboken and commute to Midtown. Either way you go from a 45 minute commute to maybe a 2-3 hour commute if you are lucky. Even worse since now using a bike his commute is ~20 miles instead of the 4 in the first place.
Excuses... I don't even live in NYC and yet it took me 1 minute to find a better option: take the ferry (bikes are allowed). http://goo.gl/maps/ssB0 . I bet on a good day you can cycle this route under 30 minutes including the ferry ride.
That'll cost 3x more than the bus, and it doesn't scale.
http://www.nywaterway.com/hoboken14throute.aspx
There are hundreds of thousands of people who cross the river every day. Thanks for taking 1 minute. Can anyone solve the real problem?
Re: New York to London in an hour - by train
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a great question, I wish I could reasonably answer it. I'm a big fan of rail, and while San Jose was celebrating their first 4 miles of light rail (in just 10 years from the start of the project!) I was looking that the marker in the Sacramento Rail museum (recommended) commemorating the laying of 10 miles of the Union Pacific rail line in one day . Part of it is that some folks really hate rail, so much so t…
Isn't this part of why rail is a lot easier to do in Europe? My understanding is that it is a lot harder to sue over stuff like this there. Maybe someone familiar with Europe's rail situation can chime in.
Passenger rail is excellent in Europe, but rail freight is atrocious.
It's the opposite in the USA.
The Economist had an interesting report on the reasons for the difference: http://www.economist.com/node/16636101