Improbable research: London to Edinburgh in five exciting minutes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The London and Edinburgh Vacuum Tunnel Company report is accompanied by a small notice: "The foregoing Jeu d'Esprit appeared in a recent number of the Edinburgh Star, and being well calculated to throw ridicule upon some of the preposterous plans now before the public for the investment of money, we insert it in the Register".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Pneumatic_Despatch_Comp...
(they were mostly used for packages but engineers travelled using the system as well)
"The Edinburgh Evening News reported in 1876 that the trucks containing the parcels continually stuck in the tunnels, and this was the reason for the failure of the company."
It ran until 1953. Paris also had one. It's a worthwhile read.
They say it is no longer working after the floods of 2002, but the article is from 2004 so what do I know.
Here's a great podcast on a mail system of pneumatic tubes. Definitely worth a listen.
My colleagues in that department some times had to crawl 1/4 of a mile in the tunnels to unstick the capsules! - that is why I chose the mathematical modeling section
I was trying to imagine a 1/4 mile crawl in a small tube as an engineer and was just thinking, "NOPE." but if I had built the system and it was near 100% safe, maybe...
It's not going to happen overnight, though. We're waiting on a few technological breakthroughs before it becomes viable. Fully automated robotic tunnelling and construction, for one. Automated manufacturing of those robots. Much improved materials science, probably nanotech-enabled. But when these technologies come, it's inevitable that we build such a network.
The time isn't right for vactrains but it will be eventually. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed - and this particular future has been creeping forward for literally centuries. Give it a few more decades and we'll see the real hyperloop!
Clever! Not backed by calculations there in the article, but clever and amazing nonetheless.
The magnet cleverly eliminates that.
http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit
Aside from anything else, it's a fascinating story. Refused a permit by the city, secretly built it anyway.
Trains are still the cheapest form of freight transport in the US, but I assume radically faster speeds + even cheaper costs + lower pollution and environmental impact would generate a net win for a freight hyperloop. Freight doesn't care about inconveniences like lack of toilets or being cramped. Do the benefits begin to rapidly erode under much greater weight, or will that scale?
At least, so far.
What makes buses and trains so attractive is that they take up far less space (if filled) compared with say a car carrying one passenger.
It might be too late in the UK to get cargo and freight back on the canals. Also our local post offices are being closed down, which would be the natural choice for a local pickup point. I for one wouldn't mind a text to say I have a parcel to go and collect. I'd probably be happy collecting my mail once a week (bar the spam.)
Side tracking further, I heard some old dears the other day, lamenting that they could no longer afford to send xmas cards. It now costs about a dollar to send mail by first class.
Sounds fun :)
Is this supposed to make people sceptical about Hyperloop?
There was even the London Pneumatic Dispatch Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Pneumatic_Despatch_Compa...
It is more a case of whilst this is in the public interest, how about some interesting history and tails of dreams lost.
China announced plans to build a transport system very similar to Hyperloop some 3 years ago:
http://www.dailytech.com/China+Plans+1000+KPH+Super+Train/ar...
Now we have a link suggesting the idea is centuries old.
I guess all that proves is the idea is nothing new and will not be revolutionary, that is until someone actually builds it!
Hyperloop is different in that it does not require a full vacuum, but just a low-pressure atmosphere, which make the tubes much cheaper to build an maintain. It also does not require magnetic levitation along the full length of the tube (like the Chinese proposal uses), as it uses an air cushion provided by that a compressor that sucks in that low-pressure atmosphere, further reducing the cost of building the tube. It merely uses occasional magnetic linear motors spaced out along the route to accelerate and decelerate the pod, spending most of its time coasting on its air cushion.
So, while it does share design features with many previously proposed systems, it is not exactly the same as what has been proposed before. There's a good reason why people have been talking about evacuated tube transport for centuries but no one has actually achieved it on a practical scale; the hope is that the low-pressure design will be much cheaper than the evacuated tube design.
Now, I am somewhat skeptical of the incredibly low numbers that Elon Musk quotes, especially relative to the much more well understood high-speed rail he's comparing it to. But you shouldn't dismiss it just because there are some superficial similarities to previously proposed systems; as far as I know (and I haven't done much research, so I could be wrong), this is the first such system that proposes using low pressure, a compressor on the front of the pod to deal with the problem of the air mass not being able to flow around it, and an air cushion to support the pod taking advantage of the air taken in by the compressor.