
Vacuum trains: a high-speed pipe dream? - prostoalex
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120601-high-speed-pipedreams
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lotsofmangos
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For some reason I find this message amusing.

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Schweigi
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](http://www.swissmetro.ch/en)

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stuki
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.

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Yacoby
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.

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jessriedel
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.

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WildUtah
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

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jessriedel
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.

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jqm
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.

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userbinator
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.

