Magtube

Eddy - a little advice. I think I you should put your mind to some of the life safety issues that were brought up in the other thread and see if you can come up with solutions. You might dismiss them as risks that people need to take to get where they are going fast but the government won't see it that way. I'm sure with some engineering thought a solution could be found.

snowboard99 said:

Eddy - a little advice. I think I you should put your mind to some of the life safety issues that were brought up in the other thread and see if you can come up with solutions. You might dismiss them as risks that people need to take to get where they are going fast but the government won't see it that way. I'm sure with some engineering thought a solution could be found.

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Well for a start it has to be people only and not anything that can burn and by having only 100 people carriages you reduce the risk.

It really should be compared to aircraft which at the moment seems like a race to the bottom like last time when everybody was cutting corners.

Reposted here...

I'd like to repeat a question I posed earlier and this applies to 'hyperloop' as much as it does to 'magtube'.

What is the <i>incremental</i> benefit of any system that can move people at over 500Kph, compared to the benefit of moving people at only 500Kph?

As much as this is aimed at Eddy, I'm curious if anyone else has an insight into this.

Lets start by msking the observation that anything that can travel at over 250Kphr is going to win against car travel. And that replacing car travel is far more important than air travel in terms of sheer numbers.

Lets also observe that a train trip that takes 2.5 hours from Sydney to Melbourne will capture over half the market and that a trsin trip that takes a bit under 2 hours will capture most of the market. That's achievable at well below 500Kphr.

Now at 1000Kphr you get under and hour. You increase your market share. BUT you only do so incrementally. Say from 70-85%. Is it worth it?

I very much doubt it.

That's Sydney to Melbourne. There are longer journeys of course, but if your alternative to glying is only as fast as flying and you're offering yet another 'torture tube' experience, complete with security queues, where is the competitive advantage?

If you could do 1500Kphr and you're willing to fork out the price tag, then Sydney to Perth is worth a thought. But its a relatively small market.

How about New York to London? Sure. When we get more sophisticated, use more robotic construction etc. But this may never apply to Australia. Ok I admit that I'd love to see a fixed link from Sydney to Jakarta to Singapore but I'm getting ahead of myself.

In any case the obvious answer is hypersonic flight and we are making real progress toward that. Google the SABRE engine for a example.

I don't buy supersonic/hypersonic travel in tubes. If you want rarified air, you don't have to go very far UP.

I also don't buy the argument that tubes will be cheaper. Its another case of 'anything you can do, I can do better' or more prosaicly, anything you can do to reduce the civil engineering cost of a 'tube can also be employed to reduce the cost of a more conventional atmospheric-pressure system. And that also applies to tunneling Eddy. Yes there are advances to be yet made, but it doesn't affect the above arguments. Better tunneling also means better WoR or maglev or some hybrid of the two.

Zoom

It would be no faster at all than twin 500kph tracks but it would only cost half as much.

The way I see it is at $35b it would be doable but at $70b it just will not happen.

Actually there would be less tunnelling and magtrack for single 1,000 kph bi directional trains than for twin atmospheric maglev unless you want to use the 12.6m wide horseshoe tunnels like the Japanese maglev and as a geologist you would know how much harder it would be to support them but you would still need twin magtrack.

eddyb said:

Well for a start it has to be people only and not anything that can burn and by having only 100 people carriages you reduce the risk.

It really should be compared to aircraft which at the moment seems like a race to the bottom like last time when everybody was cutting corners.

Click to expand...

So what are the real advantages over flying? I accept that it may be possible to have stations in more convenient locations (such as within a CBD itself) however you've now accepted that it would require security measures and screening similar to the experience at the airport.

The biggest disadvantage I see is the operational inflexibility of the whole thing - such as the inability to scale up to handle future growth (in your design you cannot simply add additional train services). This in turn means it's extremely unlikely to archive the 'monopoly' and guaranteed income that you tout.

That's completely aside from the practical considerations of financing, physical construction, etc

eddyb said:

Zoom

It would be no faster at all than twin 500kph tracks but it would only cost half as much.

The way I see it is at $35b it would be doable but at $70b it just will not happen.

Actually there would be less tunnelling and magtrack for single 1,000 kph bi directional trains than for twin atmospheric maglev unless you want to use the 12.6m wide horseshoe tunnels like the Japanese maglev and as a geologist you would know how much harder it would be to support them but you would still need twin magtrack.

Click to expand...

Eddy, the problem here is that if you're sole idea is that its cheaper to build a single directional line, the same could be applied to an atmospheric system with passing loops.

The other issue I brought to you before is the issue of capacity. Air travel isn't as large a market as car travel and HSR has the greatest economic benefits in replacing car travel. But to do that you need a lot of capacity and "tubes" are limited by basic design.

Even if I were to concede that instead of "capsules" you were to run "trains" (which amounts to a bunch of capsules all let loose at the same time with next to no separation distance) you'd have to try very hard to match the capacity of a regular train type service.

But even if you get there, you still have to face the fact that anything sealed is going to come at addition cost to anything atmospheric (all else being equal).

Now there's several issues there, but the one I'd like you to deal with is the for any given implementation that involves sealed tubes, there is an equivalent implementation that isn't sealed that is cheaper (and has equal performance otherwise apart from raw speed). So take away the advantage of raw speed (which was the whole point of talking about incremental gains) and the argument about cost collapses in a heap.

Tyson said:

So what are the real advantages over flying? I accept that it may be possible to have stations in more convenient locations (such as within a CBD itself) however you've now accepted that it would require security measures and screening similar to the experience at the airport.

The biggest disadvantage I see is the operational inflexibility of the whole thing - such as the inability to scale up to handle future growth (in your design you cannot simply add additional train services). This in turn means it's extremely unlikely to archive the 'monopoly' and guaranteed income that you tout.

That's completely aside from the practical considerations of financing, physical construction, etc

Click to expand...

It would be more reliable and at 4,000 passengers per hour each way have more capacity

zoomwhoosh said:

Eddy, the problem here is that if you're sole idea is that its cheaper to build a single directional line, the same could be applied to an atmospheric system with passing loops.

The other issue I brought to you before is the issue of capacity. Air travel isn't as large a market as car travel and HSR has the greatest economic benefits in replacing car travel. But to do that you need a lot of capacity and "tubes" are limited by basic design.

Even if I were to concede that instead of "capsules" you were to run "trains" (which amounts to a bunch of capsules all let loose at the same time with next to no separation distance) you'd have to try very hard to match the capacity of a regular train type service.

But even if you get there, you still have to face the fact that anything sealed is going to come at addition cost to anything atmospheric (all else being equal).

Now there's several issues there, but the one I'd like you to deal with is the for any given implementation that involves sealed tubes, there is an equivalent implementation that isn't sealed that is cheaper (and has equal performance otherwise apart from raw speed). So take away the advantage of raw speed (which was the whole point of talking about incremental gains) and the argument about cost collapses in a heap.

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You will find the Japanese Maglev still needs twice the width tunnels with only 4 seats per row where Magtube is 5.6m wide with 10 seats per row

Tyson said:

That's it? So you haven't taken reliability into account in your design at all - you just assume it will be reliable because it's out of the weather?

icard:

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The Japanese maglev is truly proven and so are the jet compressors they have on planes

Tyson said:

That's it? So you haven't taken reliability into account in your design at all - you just assume it will be reliable because it's out of the weather?

icard:

Click to expand...

The Japanese maglev is truly proven and so are the jet compressors they have on planes