...hyperloops—which propose propelling passengers down a vacuum-sealed tube in pods at speeds reaching 670 miles per hour—were struggling to gain traction long before COVID. Virgin Hyperloop has intrigued only one potential client, Saudi Arabia, since its inception in 2014, while rival hyperloop ventures have already given up.
Thus, the concept Musk originally proposed morphed into a train levitating on banks of magnets embedded in a guideway. This is also not a new idea. The Chinese opened the world's first commercial, high-speed "MagLev" train between a station on the outskirts of Shanghai and Pudong International Airport in 2002. It hits around 270 mph. And the Japanese are building a MagLev between Tokyo and Nagoya to complement their crowded and almost too-successful, 200-mph, conventional steel-wheel-on-steel-rail bullet trains.
The trouble is that MagLev guideways are extremely expensive--something like twice the cost per mile of conventional steel-wheel-on-steel-rail HSR, depending how one breaks down the numbers. That's why Germany, which pioneered the technology, has abandoned MagLev. Hyperloop developers would have to contend with a prohibitively expensive magnetic track combined with the unknown but fearsome costs of enclosing the entire guideway and trains inside a giant air-tight tube - and then building a system to evacuate the atmosphere from the tube. It also means building stations with space-station-like air locks.
Yes, it's possible to do all this. And with wheel friction and aerodynamic drag eliminated, a MagLev could hit nearly 700 mph - at least, in theory.
But any cost-benefit analysis of running MagLev trains inside depressurized tubes makes it clear why "vactrains" have been relegated to science fiction and magazines such as Popular Mechanics since the 1950s.
The simple fact is George Stephenson and other railroad pioneers came up with a very efficient, low-friction way to move large numbers of people and massive amounts of freight in the 19th Century: steel-wheeled trains on steel-railed tracks. Today, electrified HSR trains in Europe and Asia commonly run at 200 mph. HSR trains have tested at near 360 mph, so there's still decades of evolutionary speed improvements to be made as more efficiencies are figured out.
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