[tdn]
This reminds me of the various atmospheric railway ideas from the mid 1800s, or perhaps the Chicago Tunnel Company. Not exactly competitive with trucks or steel wheels on steel rails.
An appropriate quote from the movie A Christmas Story comes to mind. “Now, I could never be sure, but I thought that I heard the sound of taps being played. Gently.”
You mean that Virgin Hyperloop is on its last leg… and something about it is broken? [:-^]
Too big for a telpher; too small for meaningful quantities of express; you can’t fit those electric Amazon delivery vans in there and even if you could the extra speed would be wasted.
And the first disaster at 700mph in the evacuated tube spells the end of whatever profit the thing might provide. Just because there aren’t passengers at the pointy end to die or suffocate or whatever doesn’t make people around the thing immortal, and routing it to and from the moral equivalent of Sanford or Rotterdam eliminates most of the actual benefit, whatever that was supposed to have been, from the operating model, whatever that might have turned out to be.
If you put the money right here, right now, in some of the existing 12-passenger-size autonomous hybrid aircraft, you’d make more money with less risk and far, far, far less unrecoverable stranded cost. [Not that I advocate that for freight, either, mind you…]
You’d think that Branson and his outfit, of all people, would recognize that.
And the answer is: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk
Virgin looses again!
Elon Musk seems to be very big on tunnels, even when they aren’t practicable (See Miami proposal). I wonder who he will blame for why this failed.
I thought we already had hyperloops in this country that carry cargo. I think they call them pipelines.
They don’t move their cargos at high speeds.
What about the pneumatic tubes in the old department stores?
Still in use at banks for drive-throughs now.
There’s a Home Depot near me that uses the vacuum tubes. I’ve seen in old movies that take place in stores, a travelling basket system to bring stuff here and there. I’ve always wondered how they worked.
The hanging-basket system was commonly called a ‘telpher’ and one common way it was used was to take payment from multiple locations in the store (which might be on multiple floors) to one central secure accounting location where the receipt would be prepared. One of the reasons for the development of complicated ‘cash registers’ was to allow multiple locations where this could be done – later, by comparatively unskilled operators.