1841- British engineer Isambard Brunel built and atmospheric railway. (The South Devon Railway). Trains were pushed along by a long piston enclosed in a cast iron tube that ran along the middle of the track. The vacuum was created by stationary pump houses. (a)
This actually worked and was in revenue service. The problem was in maintaining the leather seal that kept the air out of the slot that accomodated the connector from the piston to the train. This was converted to use locomotives the next year but it was an innvention ahead of it’s time. This makes me think of Elon Musks hyperloop and what kind of unexpeted issues he will face.
(a) Credit: Smithsonian Train- The Definitive Visual History CR 2014
I can’t help thinking about the pneumatic tubes used at the drive-through windows at banks or department stores over half a century ago when I read about hyperloop. There’s a book published in 1884 that describes “Atmospheric Railways” that you might be interested in. It’s “Wonders & Curiosities Of the Railway” by William Kennedy.
Exactly. All the propenents of hyperloop telling tales about how much cheaper it is than HSR are wrong. Shoehorning a route with much wider vertical and horizontal curves into the same landscape inevitably raises costs.
Take a look at the proposed speeds of the Hyperloop. The airline industry are the ones to be worried. HSR doesn’t exist, and probably never will to any extent in the US.
If the Hyperloop proves to be viable, it will draw private investment capital. The only source of capital HSR has to go after is the taxpayer.
I don’t think many of us have the subject matter knowledge or scientific aptitude to make a judgment on the ability of the Hyperloop to handle curves.
All we know is that it runs through a tube, so it can’t be seen, and is a boring capsule that doesn’t make much noise. Therefore, from a railfan perspective, it must be bad.
Much of why HSR is more expensive to build than regular lines is because of the greater speed requiring more gradual vertical and horizontal curves to keep interior forces at acceptable levels. If you increase the speed to hyperloop levels, you must increase the diameter of both vertical and horizontal curves. Thus it is far more expensive. Tunnel boring is tremendously costly.
Add in problems with the precision required by high speeds, problems if there are incidents, and it looks almost totally impractical.
At this point, the Hyperloop may well be a pipe dream, time with tell. What is known, is that the current methods of personal intercity transportation in America are dysfunctional, and declining in efficiency. There’s been no innovation since the advent of the Interstate Highway System and jet airliner. Something’s wrong when I can get a package quicker than I can travel the same distance myself.
I welcome any visionaries, regardless of how far-fetched their ideas may seem. I speak as someone who had rather have a better way to get from point A to point B, than to get my jollies taking pictures of a 200 mph train whiz by. And I do like trains, or I wouldn’t be here.
I understand your viewpoint. I just think that this system is like the monorails of the '50s and '60s; the next big thing that never happened. Now that I think of it, there are similar issues with passing and switching.
As the US is a developed nation, I expect that the improvements will be primarily incremental. Much, if not most, of the problem is that population growth has generally outpaced capacity growth and maintenance. It’s far easier to fix those problems than raising massive amounts of capital for whole new systems.
Rather than build outlandishly expensive transport systems to get from point A to point B; I believe that we are more likely to simply make it unnecessary to travel from point A to point B.
What about Alfred Beach’s pneumatic subway? A one car train that had a membrane at one end, sealing to the walls of the tunnel and air pressure blew the car down the track. As I understand it, it’s still down there under the streets of Manhattan. I’d love to see it.
This would be a Vacume Tube- The Problem here is rescuing people in a pod that is stuck in a vacume tube underground. In Space no one can hear you scream
I posted a link to that above. I’d also like to see it, but I think much or most of it was obliterated in the construction of the BMT Broadway Line, whose workers actually found the lost line.
A major contributor to the issue is that the established transportation industry is interested in maintaining the status quo. Airlines want to haul passengers between a handful of major hubs. The railroads want to haul freight, and outside of the Northeast Corrider, Amtrak is basically a glorified tourist railroad.
In the past, or at least since the mid-20th century, innovation in transportation has been a side benefit of the defense industry. Those opportunities no longer exist.
Any future innovation, will come from the private sector. In particular, the information technology companies, that can apply the technology to transportation. We’re in the infancy of that now.
The elephant in the room is that all new transportation modes require land acquisition in some degree or another. This runs against environmental forces and laws that weren’t in place, when we built the current transportation network. One thing we can be thankful for, is what we do have, was largely built before 1970. I doubt it could be built today.
I’m in full agreement, hence the only incremental improvements. Seeing what has happened to so many projects (EIS and eminent domain lawsuits, etc) has really made me cynical about any major infrustructure expansion, particularly one that will have as large of a footprint as hyperloop. In a crisis, this could change, but we don’t ever seem to act before things become a crisis. Complacency will doom us as a nation if we are not careful.
That seems quite convincing in explaining the practical problems with hyperloop. Coping with the large linear expansion and contraction not being absorbed in muliple expansion joints seems farfetched. Perhaps more farfetched would be the alternative of using thousands of telescoping expansion joints with zero tolerance for any degree of joint failure. Then there is the problem of the entire tube being warmer on the top side than the bottom side, thus causing a differential in the linear expansion and contraction. I would say that the whole tube needs to be jacketed in a temperture controlled housing so there would be no expansion and contraction of the tube.