Vacuum trains: a high-speed pipe dream? | Hacker News Reader

Vacuum trains: a high-speed pipe dream?

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13 pointsprostoalex9 comments

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For some reason I find this message amusing.

There was a project proposed in Switzerland about a vacuum metro a couple of years ago. It never made it out of the concept phase because of the costs. The goal was to make a city to city connection with a speed of 800km/h. The project website contains techical details too: http://www.swissmetro.ch/en

What always irked me about the whole "vacuum train" debate, is that once you have vacuum, why bother with trains?

Trains beat individual cars efficiency wise, largely because they are long and have low frontal areas, hence air resistance, for their size and carrying capacity. Get rid of the air, and why not go whole hog with lightning fast cars?

Heck, put in place mechanisms to charge e-cars' batteries when in tunnel, and you can not only shoot someone to Europe in an hour, but allow him to drive out of the airlock and to his final destination pretty much interruption free as well. With Elon Musk being the latest hawker of vacuum tunnel hype, maybe we'll finally get to see a Tesla with no need to apologize for limited range.....

More realistically, before even contemplating doing a passenger version, someone should at least do a preliminary, by soundly and reliably beating FedEx Overnight Air between New York and LA/SF. Then plan on going from there with acquired learnings.

Safety, how do you know the car is safe, what do you do if it has a leak, etc etc. A single unit that can be tested and properly maintained is a far better idea.

You also then require car ownership, with very specialised cars that only a few would be able to afford.

City design in Europe also seems for the most part to be trying to push cars out of cities. If I was going for a business meeting in London I would prefer not to have a car. Taxi and expenses would be far easier.

The security at a vacuum train station will need to be comparable to an airport, maybe more so, because the tube will be highly expensive and very publicly visible. (Assume for the sake of amusement that airport security has something to do with preventing actual threats.) You can probably put these stations closer to cities than airports, but that only cuts out 30 minutes of the 3+ hour lead time you need for international flights, because most of the lead time is spent inside the actual airport dealing with security, baggage, etc.

They should put the customs agents and immigration police on the train and have them go down the aisles clearing passengers while the train is in motion.

Then there's no waiting. You walk through the nude rape-o-scanners at Penn Station in New York and step right onto the train and over the next ninety minutes the passengers are all reviewed by Schengen police so they can step off the train at Gare du Nord right into the Tenth Arrondissement of Paris

Well, I'm talking about travel security, not border security. All the boarder security happens at the end of the journey, so doesn't effect my comment. But yes, you could do customs in transit and potentially save yourself that time, but only if space on the train isn't at a premium (which it will be). I expect the vacuum trains to have tiny interiors like airplanes because building larger tunes will be so expensive.

The idea certainly seems feasible to me.

And besides, I really really want to see these things in my lifetime. How awesome it would be to rapidly travel to distant places and be back the same day.

I agree it would be great for travel, but the two biggest barriers I see are cost and safety. Keeping a long tunnel evacuated is not easy to do, and when something goes wrong at those speeds, in a vacuum, the results will be pretty horrific to say the least.

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