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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I have been taking the wrong trains (in Germany), but 200 mph (321 km/h) seems plenty fast to me.

That's higher than the maximum speed of most of Deutsche Bahn's high-speed trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity-Express

Even those that can go faster than 300 km/h tend to do so only on very short legs, because they need long straight stretches to stay on track and have to accelerate/decelerate at the ends as well.

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Real high speed in Germany does not make sense, too many stops due to political reasons ("Wolfsburg" comes to mind and "Kassel"). That's the reason new ICE trains are slower than their predecessors. Other countries have far fewer stops on high speed routes and can therefor have faster trains (e.g. Japan and France).

Distances in China are enormous compared to those within Germany. Japan is in the convenient situation of being rather long and slim so that its railway network is almost 1D rather than 2D. So their settings are quite different.

Note how the ICE 3 operates at 320km/h and the ICE 4 only goes up to 230km/h. I would assume they’re optimising for efficiency now.

Hyperloops would also have those constraints on track layout.

I think this is another reason why musk is getting into tunneling. Reducing the cost of tunnels lets you place the hyperloop track in a more optimal location.

would you still use a steel containment pipe? poured cement seems like it would be cheaper, but every example I've seen develops cracks and starts letting in water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Velaro

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