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London's Victorian Hyperloop: a pneumatic railway beneath the capital (2013)
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoThe images don’t appear for me but do on the original New Statesman article: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/12/londons-victorian-hyperloop-forgotten-pneumatic-railway-beneath-capitals-street https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/12/londons-victor...
- rob_c 4y ago
- dang 4y ago"Please don't fulminate." "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rob_c 4y agoyes, but unfortunately that is an exacting definition of the hyperloop compared to a device which actually was made and used regadless of it's commercial success and failings. The other IS snake oil.
- dang 4y agoMaybe so, but sticking to the site guidelines takes precedence, and you can always make your substantive point without breaking them.
- rob_c 4y agofine I'll not wish shame on people knowing/understanding better, I guess it pays to be more direct and say they 'should be expected to know better' directly if they're able to write/understand at this level
- neonate 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210929030913/https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/12/londons-victorian-hyperloop-forgotten-pneumatic-railway-beneath-capitals-street https://web.archive.org/web/20210929030913/https://www.newst...
- ballenf 4y agoAll the problems from the hyper loop involve the energy of a vacuum. Why not accelerate the air in the tube in an actual loop? You reduce air pressure in front and increase it behind the car? Train cards could have baffles to allow for stops (let the air pass by the car).
- addicted 4y agoThe problem with the hyper loop is that it’s not clear it solves any real problems. For subway style intra city transit the rapid speeds and acceleration are hardly useful since you have many short travel segments. It’s a non starter there. For inter city travel, the biggest challenge is getting right of way and building infrastructure between the 2 cities. This is hard enough to do for regular HSR, which has far more tolerance than the hyperloop vacuum tube would. It’s not clear how one would solve that for the hyperloop.
- gamblor956 4y agoDamn you for going beyond first principles and actually thinking about why something that seems so simple hasn't actually been done before! /s
- boxed 4y ago> The problem with the hyper loop is that it’s not clear it solves any real problems. The rest of your comment doesn't back that up. The hyperloop potentially solves the problem of air travel out competing railways even though air travel has enormous environmental costs and generally sucks due to overhead in transits and small cabins. The problem with hyperloop is as you say actually building it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't solve a problem. It just means it has its own practical problems that aren't even technical.
- zdragnar 4y agoAir is removed to reduce drag / pressure on the car. If, instead of removing it, it were accelerated, you would need one of two things: 1) Move the air at the maximum speed of the cars. This optimizes for that speed, but increases wear on the brakes and total braking distance by putting forward pressure on the train as it slows down. 2) Move the air at some average speed. Now you increase overall energy consumption having to fight (some) drag, while also having (slightly) increased brake wear and stopping distance. Nobody wins here, and you'd need to do a lot of fancy maths to figure out the right balance between energy consumption of the train and air-moving fans versus energy consumption of creating and maintaining a vacuum. Alternatively, you could get crazy complex by having something like blast doors sitting between different zones (acceleration, top speed, deceleration) that automatically open and close, and try to create loops of air at different speeds and directions in each of the sections. I'm not even going to bother guessing how difficult to safely operate or how efficient such a system would be.
- cosmodisk 4y agoIf you are ever in London, this place is amazing: https://www.postalmuseum.org/visit-us/what-to-expect/mail-rail/ https://www.postalmuseum.org/visit-us/what-to-expect/mail-ra...