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Comment by lom | Hacker News Reader

This is dumb. Another one of those trains but less-efficient and more costly. Digging tunnels is expensive, even more so across an entire country. Taking out ventilation or escape routes will cut the price, yes - but not enough. And what if something happens inside the tunnel, batteries aren’t famed for their incombustibility…

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It's Switzerland, tunnels there always have the secondary use of being usable as bunkers in a war. Also... it's Switzerland, half the country is mountains. These guys know how to build tunnels for cheap, if anyone can scale this to being cheap enough it's them.

Im concurring with you and dissenting with lom. Switzerland is very mountainous that trains laid on the surface will actually be a very very stupid proposition, with active gearing and such and with reduced cargo weight to match. Yes, they have indeed perfected trains on rugged slopes, but only because back then tunneling is a very slow and manual operation that it's not economically and technologically feasible. Lom would be right if the mountains are gentler slopes, but I think lom haven't visited the Alps and appreciate the problem. In this case, the tunnels are actually a far better and more economical solution than overground trains.

Interesting perspective. I have been to the Alps several times, and do realize how limiting it can be. That's the reason the CBT and Gotthard base Tunnel is so important and plays such a central role. The problems start there, upgrading these two massive pieces of infrastructure to support these new types of trains (also note the vendor lock in through novel systems) would be costly and probably not possible without delays for current freight.

I'd normally agree with you, but I don't think you fathom how incredibly starved for space Swiss logistics is. There are densely populated parts of the country where logistics capacity is maxed out, but where there's no more space on roads or to build more warehouses. My understanding is that the CST sprung out of those problems.

Trains are great, but are losing out to trucks, so I think there's a lot of promise in "trains, but small" approaches, even if none of them have taken off so far.

Manual access is a concern, but from what I can tell the vehicles are powered by induction instead of batteries. The cargo might be the bigger fire risk.

> Trains are great, but are losing out to trucks (...)

They really aren't. It's already known that there's a distance and throughpot threshold where roadway and railway make more sense. The main blocker on the ralway side is that infrastructure costs are quite high, and roadway's flexibility always involves trucks handling the last mile.

Building entirely new infrastructure around an entire country for something that can already be achieved by more traditional means is a huge misallocation of money.

> Taken off so far

Other than the Beijing airport train there is no real other maglev running. Even the Virgin Hyperloop has achieved more than this project. And let's not get into what happened to them recently...

> even more so across an entire country.

The website is very clear that the intent is for these tunnels to be dug underneath cities, to relieve traffic burden from road distribution.

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