91–100 of 155 posts
I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
Vastly higher speeds is the reason it would be valuable if it can be made economically feasible.
If you were also one of the leading railway makers, it would protect you from such a thing because you could make money from government contracts to make trains instead. In the coming elections, it is very unlikely that Trump is coming back nor is the Democratic party going to win any elections at least in the next 6 years so railway isn't happening... hence this move.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virgin Hyperloop uses maglev. The main difference between what they're doing and everyone else, is that they put their whole track in a giant airtight pipe, and pump air out of the pipe so the train can travel with less air resistance.
You don't really need to remove air resistance to beat Amtrak though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is presumably a reason they are cargo companies and not passager transport companies. Unless Amtrak has a government enforced monopoly?
Because all the US passenger rail companies went out of business. Amtrak was essentially created out of the wreckage to maintain some passenger rail service. (It's a very complicated history.) Amtrak makes almost all of its money on the Northeast Corridor which it then basically throws away in the rest of the country.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glossing over the fact that almost all the railways in the US are privately owned by cargo companies which prioritize their cargo over transport. Huge reason Amtrak struggles so much
There is presumably a reason they are cargo companies and not passager transport companies. Unless Amtrak has a government enforced monopoly?
> Railroad corporations operated under charters received from the states, [...] These charters usually vested the railroad with a public mission and some pub- lic responsibility. Railroads were chartered to carry passengers and freight, for which they were incidentally permitted to charge fares.
> AMTRAK has not, during its brief existence, attempted to operate its own trains with its own personnel, but has instead chosen to rely upon contracts with the railroads. The result has been the immediate freeing of railroads from the passenger deficit. AMTRAK has also created a type of cost-plus subsidy, with no incentive to the operating railroad to improve services or control costs. The results are generally what one would expect.
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
I've heard it said Amtrak was designed to fail so that freight would have no competition. It seems to me this is the case, since anytime Amtrak tries to expand (or even re-establish service as in Mobile-New Orleans), the freight companies immediately go to court to prevent being forced to share their infrastructure.
I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
Because the current passenger rail “system” in the US is horrendous.
A lot of people seem to be confused. Elon does not have any companies working on a hyperloop. He kicked off the idea and released a white paper with some very early engineering work seemingly put together by a group of engineers working at SpaceX and Tesla[1]. He never had any plans to commercialize it himself and was releasing it as "open source" for anyone else to take up. Several companies sprang up to pursue the…
There are a lot of reasons standard rail in the US is cargo centric. Profit and a much easier customer service case are big ones. Also, sending cargo in a new transportation system is much easier and less lawsuit prone than people. An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.
Radio too, Marconi suggested to the Italian Post they use radio for mail.
Hyperloop’s lack of scalability makes it even less suitable for transporting cargo than passenger travel.
Obviously there is no hyperloop system yet so we can't speak about real life stats but the idea of hyperloop is a pod that goes really fast because of the vacuum.
Change "pod" to "shipping container".
So if you can send one shipping container after another at, say, 400 mph, what exactly would be scalability problem. It would clearly be faster that rail and therefore having a higher throughput.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virgin Hyperloop uses maglev. The main difference between what they're doing and everyone else, is that they put their whole track in a giant airtight pipe, and pump air out of the pipe so the train can travel with less air resistance.
You don't really need to remove air resistance to beat Amtrak though.
Let's say you want to go from SF to Seattle, a distance of about 800 miles. If you had a typical high-speed maglev train (250 mph), the trip would take about 3 hours. On an airplane, the actual transit would take a little under 2 hours, so if you get to the airport an hour early that's 3 hours total. (Personally I never show up to the airport more than 20 minutes early for domestic flights.) So for any trip longer than that, airplanes beat even high-speed maglev trains on speed. Of course there are factors besides raw speed to consider, like comfort and cost, but speed is an important one.
The bigger your country is, the more the fixed-cost of airline security is amortized over the distance traveled. If you don't have to travel very far, trains make sense. In Japan the population density is 10x higher than in the US, so trips tend to be much shorter. In the US, which is very spread out comparatively speaking, planes are much more compelling. So US trains need to either be really fast, or really cheap and comfortable, to be worth it.
The fastest maglev trains can go quite a bit faster than 250mph, by the way. For example Japan is constructing its "L0 series" which will have a top speed of around 375mph, and at this point you do compete with planes. Building one of these seems a lot more realistic than anything Hyperloop, but it's not like these superfast maglevs are anything conventional either, so I don't see the harm in experimenting with fun tech like vacuum-sealing the train.