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I doubt Hyperloop is the future for freight, and freight is overwhelmingly where it's at for railroads (in terms of $$$). Hyperloop is built for passengers, where speed is the overriding concern. For freight rail, price of transportation is the primary concern. Accelerating a few tons of iron ore to nearly the speed of sound to get it somewhere is prrrobably not worth it.

I don't even think I really buy the "3D printing will change everything" take either. Railroads will still be perfectly useful for shipping 3D-printer feedstock to distribution points for feeding the 3D-printing micro-factories.

Unless the author says that passenger rail - in the US, that'd be Amtrak - should watch out for the future, in which case I'd say that's been patently obvious for longer than I've been alive . . .

The RoW is highly valuable for all sorts of stuff. Back in the day, iirc, Qwest was owned by Phil Anshutz, who also owned the Southern Pacific Railroad. He used the SP RoW to lay down huge tracts of Fiber, which the other railroads copied.

They can and do run all sorts of stuff long the tracks - fiber, natural gas pipelines, and soon high transmission power lines.

> Southern Pacific Communications decided they needed a new name to differentiate the switched voice service from SpeedFAX, and ran an internal contest to select a name. The winning entry was "SPRINT", an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_Corporation

If you want to talk about "Back in the day", telegraph companies had been running their lines along ROWs since the 1860s. They would obviously have to duplicate ways across vast expanses of the country otherwise. In exchange, they would leave a few conductors open for the railroads to use for their communications.

There is nothing inherently cheaper about building rockets versus building rockets. You still need steel tubes, fuel, safety checking, failsafes, tons of programming, recovery tests, launch tests, etc etc etc. You think contracting out the launch site is the expensive part? Boeing and Lockheed, Bush, and Obama put a total pricetag of getting to Mars at ~100 billion. Why does Musk think he can do it in 10?

The major cost of building out a high speed rail line isn't even the right of way. It's that the entire structure of the system is geared towards making payouts to politically connected individuals, industries, and special interests. If you know anything about CHSR, you'd know that already ~$20MM has been spent on it without even laying down a single track (er, they might have started a smidge of work on it in an inconsequential section) or acquiring any rights of way. This is already way way way overbudget. If anything the overriding reason that Hyperloop will be cheaper is that it stands a chance of being a carte blanche idea - where the influence- and money- grubbing constituencies have at least a shot of minimizing their impact on the bottom line of the project.

Regardless of the merits of this argument, it's not relevant here. Musk didn't estimate the cost of the SF->LA hyperloop on the basis of "I have a unique ability to lower the costs of this project."

He estimated the cost as low based on the use of a preexisting right-of-way (mainly I-5), and needing an inherently narrower, lighter "track" than was envisioned for HSR.

A hyperloop designed for freight would presumably be wider than what Musk envisioned for the passenger-focused LA/SF route, and in some routes would involve either purchasing or repurposing rights of way.

> Musk didn't estimate the cost of the SF->LA hyperloop on the basis of "I have a unique ability to lower the costs of this project."

No, but he didn't bother to explicitly explain why the CHSR is expensive, he just gave their figure (which is almost certainly an underestimate). For example, unwritten went the parts about not servicing cities where there is less demand (mostly a political play by CHSR).... There won't be a hyperloop designed for freight - most freight runs perfectly fine on existing rail lines. Part of the reason why passenger rail in the US sucks is that it shares lines with freight the safety standards for freight are more lax, for obvious reasons, and the speed tolerances lower, so passenger rail is restricted to lower speeds on freight lines, then amtrak has to make exorbitant payouts to rent-seekers like BNSF and Norfolk Southern (the most egregious of them, IIRC) just to rent back that right of way.

for example, the Dianne Feinstein's husband's company chairs (CBRE) was awarded the contract for construction of segments of CHSR.

He's on the board of directors of CBRE. Also, CBRE is the preeminent commercial real estate company in the world. I'd be amazed if you could accomplish a project of that magnitude without involving that company at some level.

I actually made a mistake - it wasn't CBRE that won the award, but rather a company called "Tutor-Perini", which Richard Blum is the chairman of the board for.

There's all sorts of fishy things going on: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/Apr/21/tp-high-speed-rai...

The thing is that the speed of travel determines how quickly you can curve and that's built in to the right of way. The major limitation on the speeds on the current northeast corridor is the curvature of tracks which were built for slower trains. Without a link I can't be sure, but I believe that the $160 billion high-speed rail plan you're referring to required building new right of way, at least between New York and Boston.