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New York to London in an hour - by train

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Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#81

Post by rogerbinns »

Someone wrote: post #62
Eliezer wrote: post #42

Earlier 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?

They built awfully bad ones, by today's standards. Rails weren't prestretched and welded together. Instead, they left gaps between rails to cater for temperature differences ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_(rail_transport)#Joining_... ) Modern trains also are heavier and accelerate and decelerate faster than the trains you see in westerns. Both mean that they exert greater forces on the rails. Finally, safety st…

There is also the issue that the FRA in the US makes trains considerably heavier than equivalents in the rest of the world. http://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#82

Post by rogerbinns »

moystard wrote: post #69
marvin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I've been thinking as well. This might be an unintended consequence if SpaceX is able to reliably deploy the reusable rockets they are drawing today. It might actually require less energy to launch a passenger vehicle above the atmosphere and let it glide/freefall all the way to the destination than it does to push the same vehicle through the atmosphere. I haven't actually done any calculations, though.…

The disadvantage of your solution is the environment impact of such a transportation system. An electricity based solution seems to be much cleaner (especially if we imagine the same kind of traffic as the plane one today).

Couldn't you use electricity to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water, and then "burn" that in the rockets to produce water again?

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#83

Post by mertd »

melling wrote: post #79
mertd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Monthly bike pass is surely cheaper or comparable to whatever he is paying for parking. I solved his problem.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#84

Post by fennecfoxen »

Alex3917 wrote: post #47
usaar333 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really shouldn't be that bad. The cost is mainly due to it being in a dense city and having to deal with endless environmental (broad sense) concern. A better comparison is an actual underwater tube: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube 3.6 miles cost about $1 billion in 2012 dollars. Closer to $55k/foot. Don't get me wrong. This is still impossibly expensive even at that lower rate: $22 trillion. Even at us…

"Even at using costs of the propsed high speed rail in California ($80M/mile), nyc-london would cost $280 billion." Which is roughly 1 / 14th the cost of the Iraq war. Not bad if you think about it.

You think that's not too bad?

2006 revenues: $2440 billion

2012 revenues: $2660 billion

2006 spending: $2660 billion

2012 spending: $3790 billion

2013 spending: $3803 billion (Obama's proposed budget)

[Source: Wikipedia.]

Just think - we could do three or four megaprojects a year with a 2006-esque budget elsewhere plus those kinds of budget deficits.

Of course, as anyone in California is painfully aware, the high-speed rail project is a complete joke :) you'd need to trust that this one would do better.

Also, as an economics aside: In the private sector, a $280 billion project should hope to earn in the neighborhood of $11 billion a year in profit/savings in order to cover the cost of capital. This is, of course, after equipment maintenance, fuel/power, deprecation, labor, etc.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#85

Post by shmulkey18 »

abraham wrote: post #43
Eliezer wrote: post #42

Earlier 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?

Slave labor and "slave" labor.

Slave labor was too expensive to use because you risked losing your valuable capital. Instead new immigrants were used such as Irish (East Coast) or Chinese (West Coast).

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#86

Post by _delirium »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #63
ChuckMcM wrote: post #51

Earlier 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.

The process is definitely different at least in the smaller countries. In Denmark, when the Copenhagen metro expansion was agreed on by the government, the plans were passed as a law through the national parliament. Therefore, everything in it became by definition legal, superseding any contrary legislation, unless it violated the constitution.

The U.S. instead tends to work on a model where the legislature passes general rules, and then agencies administer the rules in specific cases. So, for example, a specific rail plan is proposed pursuant to a piece of legislation, but the plan is not itself a piece of legislation superseding others. That leaves it open to all sorts of lawsuits alleging that it didn't comply with the legislation that applies to it.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#87

Post by paulsutter »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

As a longtime gamer, this article really struck a chord with me. Dragon magazine used to print playable adventures, and in August 1981 (I just went and looked it up), there was a Gamma World adventure called "Cavern of the Sub-Train." The player characters in their post-apocalyptic world come across a abandoned series of tunnels they can't explain, but which are described for the game master in the notes: The system…

Thanks for your post. Having big dreams of the future is crucial to making that future happen.

Many posts below are trying to prove how smart they by focusing on near term impracticalities. Sure it's impractical today. That's already proven by the fact that it is not already under construction.

The surest way to be wrong is to say something can never be done. I'm not even advocating this is a good solution. I have no idea if it will ever be possible. But I enjoy seeing that some people are thinking big.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#88

Post by SoftwareMaven »

DeepDuh wrote: post #65
moocow01 wrote: post #22

I 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.

Here's how the Japanese high speed trains deal with earthquakes: They have emergency break systems (I think its small ceramic globuli or something of the sort) and a really good forewarning system. 2011-3-11 all Shinkansen were at a halt when the big one hit and noone was harmes on them. I don't see why you couldn't do the same here.

Because if the rail line cracks (which probably did appen in Japan), water floods into your tube. Then it becomes a question of "can they rescue you before your air supply ends" (since they would require an air supply for the vacuum)?

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#89

Post by iwejfweoifjweif »

mertd wrote: post #83
melling wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Monthly bike pass is surely cheaper or comparable to whatever he is paying for parking. I solved his problem.

If its only taking him 45 minutes he's probably not driving in and parking, he's probably taking mass transit on a system that is quite overloaded. So no, you didn't solve his problem, but nice try.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#90

Post by DeepDuh »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #88
DeepDuh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how the Japanese high speed trains deal with earthquakes: They have emergency break systems (I think its small ceramic globuli or something of the sort) and a really good forewarning system. 2011-3-11 all Shinkansen were at a halt when the big one hit and noone was harmes on them. I don't see why you couldn't do the same here.

Because if the rail line cracks (which probably did appen in Japan), water floods into your tube. Then it becomes a question of "can they rescue you before your air supply ends" (since they would require an air supply for the vacuum)?

Oh, this post was in reply to the underwater part? Yes, I also think that this one isn't feasible for quite some time. My reply was in response to vacuum tubes over sea level. Right now we can't even have floating tubes anchored to the sea ground yet; storm waves rip every anchor we can build apart (it has been tried for wave power generators).

Vacuum tubes could probably be built deeper down where the waves aren't strong. I actually think that earthquakes wouldn't necessarily be a problem at that level, since everything would have to be quite flexible anyway. In order to elevate security, I could imagine making tube sectors detachable and having safety shutters. This way, if one sector is breached it could be sealed and detached such that it floats to sea level. The train could even be inside if you can control the pressure differences well enough to not kill everyone inside (something that is well understood for jet planes).

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