Obviously you can't always go completely straight when you're building on the ground.
Edit: the closest comparison distance-wise is probably Barcelona to Madrid; 2:45, average 227kph.
The japanese shinkansen takes 2 hours and 22 minutes to go from Tokyo to Osaka (515 km).
Paris - Stuttgart - Nuremberg (580km) takes 6h51 including one hour between connections in Stuttgart.
Berlin - Stuttgart (591km) has a 5h34 direct connection.
Frankfurt - Bern - Milano (~700km) takes 7h47 including 30 minutes in Bern
OTOH, Frankfurt - Cologne (for which a dedicated high speed rail route was built nearly 20 years ago) is about 200km in 1h04.
The wait times are not the big problem - the problem is the time needed to decelerate and accelerate the train at each stop. E.g. a freight train of 1.200 tons needs 1km from 100 km/h to 0, and a high-speed passenger train, e.g. ICE 3, needs 3.3km from 330 km/h to 0.
New York to Los Angeles is about 4,000 km. London to Moscow is only 2,500 km.
Edit: the point here is that Europeans, in general, have no conception of the distances involved in the U.S. transportation network. Passenger rail (high speed or otherwise) works well for relatively short distances in relatively densely populated regions. The trouble is that we don't have very many of those regions.
Edit 2: so you're moderating down arithmetic now? Awesome.
There used to be a slow Quimper-Vintimille journey that was more than 1000 km, but it's been significantly shortened since then.
Your numbers show you have no conception of the distances involved in Europe. Thinking that the longest train link in France, a country that's 1000 km wide and 1000 km high, is 100 km long is completely ridiculous.
They do specifically mention "high speed" train lines.
> So what?
Call me old fashioned, but I think it's worth responding to what's actually been said.
What did I fail to read, exactly? Is it that seszett didn't explicitly specify "high speed" in that one sentence? As I said in my reply, so what? The overall point, that the 106km figure is ridiculous, stands regardless.
Even if you somehow counted only >300km/h as high-speed, then the LGV Est is a bit more than 300 km long and rated at 320 km/h. I suspect a 100 km-long high-speed line would not even be competitive against cars, except maybe in dense urban areas where car traffic is often slow.
I'm not sure what's worse, that you seriously think the longest high speed rail link in France is 106km, or that you think London to Moscow is reasonably compared to New York to Los Angeles. Why would you start from a city that's nowhere near the edge of the continent in question? The NYC->LA analog would be something like Lisbon to Moscow which, guess what! Is almost exactly the same distance.
http://www.renfe.com/viajeros/larga_distancia/productos/AVEF... (spanish)
Hyperloop is designed for medium distances transportation like between 300 and 1000. Over that, it probably make no sense against air travel.
So Europe is kind of the perfect place for hyperloop, and probably the reason why its traditional tech competitor, the high speed train, is successful. That's also the reason of my comment - if hyperloop can deliver cheaper, faster to build and plain faster connection for medium distance travel that could revolutionize transport in Europe even more than for the US.
EDIT: as another reader has noted, I missed the "106" km link. I suppose you mean 1060 or something ?
I'd say nobody has any conception of distances involved in the really big countries.