Hyperloop only works most comfortably in very flat routes. It's something I never realized until I visited Hyperloop's offices in LA when they first started.
I got to make some early promo photos for them [0] and signed a 10-year NDA in the process. However, what I learned (which is public knowledge) that at high speeds even smallest elevation drops would make the passengers feel the free-fall sensation of being on a rollercoaster. Basically at high speeds the elevation change of the vertical vector components of anything more than several degrees can approach the free fall dropping speeds.
I have also taken numerous train rides in Switzerland and driven through large parts of the country and I don't believe the technology can be used there as well as it could have been deployed in other routes in the world that is naturally more flat. So I'm wondering if this mostly an R&D project designed to export an entire tunnel/hyperloop making solution.
[0] https://www.instagram.com/p/BMiyAIdhCJn/ (photo is about 80 frames stacked. Because we only had one welder at the time and I had to reuse him and also to intricately light every parts of this lot)
The thing about ultra-high-speed is this: your benefits (travel time) grow linearly with speed, but your problems (energy, capacity, curve radii, etc.) grow quadratically.
Actually, it's worse than it sounds. Travel time has a big impact on demand--but only within a small-ish window, about 2-4 hours. Outside of that window, demand does not respond that much to changes in travel time. That means that higher speeds are ultimately about trying to bring more destinations within the acceptable travel time window, but you also have to give up destinations within that window because the stop time penalties are too high.
Switzerland has the issue that it's just too small. With conventional 300-350km/h max-speed HSR, going from the eastern to the western edge of the country could be done in about 2 hours (recall that average speed is going to be less than max speed, particularly when stops are included), which is around the point where going faster means getting no practical benefit for people. It could serve international routes, but then Switzerland is bearing the costs without reaping the benefits, which the citizenry tends not to favor very highly.
Even the HSR that operates in Switzerland, the TGV, doesn't get up to speed until it is well within France. Switzerland tracks aren't straight enough for HSR, and it would cost a lot to straighten them out.
There also isn't a lot of demand for Geneva to Zurich in an hour.
I think the demand would come after it gets built. Even bigger would be demand for Bern/Zurich and Basel/Zurich in 30min, bringing these cities comfortably into commute distance. People do that today but only if they really must.
There is an aspect of Swiss economy that makes HSR attractive: high degree of decentralization.
Those cities already feel close enough together. More to the point, I don’t think Switzerland probably wants the kind of growth that HSR would enable and encourage.
No they really aren't close enough together. For example, I know someone who moved from Zurich to Olten so that their girlfriend's commute to Bern would be reasonable. Now you have 2 people with 50 minute commutes instead of 1 person with 1h45 and another person with 15min. If there was a 30min connection from Bern to Zurich it would be perfectly reasonable to live in one and commute to the other.
Again, does Switzerland really want to become one big mega city? It is up for the Swiss to decide, but a huge commute draw between Bern and Zurich (or even Bern and Lausanne) would lead to something more like Japan.
Maybe that’s just me but I don’t think of Japan as a bad model in how to have a dense population that is prosperous. If anything their biggest problem currently is depopulation of remote areas.
It's an incongruous question. Hyperloops between Basel, Bern and Zurich would make them into one virtual Mini-City. The loops would also reduce density in the travel corridors preventing a California catastrophe kind of sprawl inbetween.
Basel<>Bern (direct) would need tunnels.. The other 2 routes are pretty flat. Most of the Swiss economy is in the valley between the Jura range and the Alps.
The necessary tunnels for Basel would probably cost less than this:
What do you mean? More ambulances would mean you could be nearer to the patients (imagine an ambulance on every street corner) so the net journey time would be less. You can also administer care from the ambulance (e.g. narcan, cpr, stopping bleeding etc.) which can save lives. A huge number of ambulance journeys aren't time critical either (e.g. a broken leg) but not having an ambulance means getting a taxi or other transport which exacerbates problems.
Probably better to have more ambulances overall, and maybe a few ultra fast ones (e.g. helicopters) for time critical situations.
It is obvious to me that you're correct though. Overall, the throughput matters. There are only so many people you can pack into a single F train and it won't help much if the train could go 60 mph all the way if the only scheduled trains arrived every two hours.
I think they're trying to talk about latency versus throughout. Latency matters more than throughput for an ambulance if you assume that only a small portion of the population will have a heart attack or needs emergency medical attention at any given time.
Regular US railroads generally are 1:100 slopes (0.6°) or less. Grades steeper than 2.2:100 (1.2°) are rare. Clearly there is a way to efficiently connect population centers which is not steep.
I think the issue is vertical curvature rather than slope. Traversing a slope at speed is just going to get you a constant vertical component which you will not feel, and not terribly fast, <20kph, about half as fast as a fast elevator. Changing slope is going to get you a vertical acceleration which could fill your tiny capsule with more vomit than one would like. The question is then, can you blend the slopes to keep that under control? Going maximum up grade to maximum down grade at full speed will be something like a 40kph velocity change, at 1G that takes 1.1 seconds, during which time you will drive 360 meters. So, blending over 360 meters gives you full weightless vomit motion or a 2x weight. The blend from full up to full down will probably need to be over a kilometer to keep things clean¹.
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¹ The internet is not being forthcoming about real world elevator accelerations. It is too polluted by imaginary physics problems. So I unilaterally decided 1/3g would be ok.
Why would it be above ground? In Switzerland tunnels are a very common thing and Swissmetro was also planned to be underground. The Gotthard Base Tunnel is a almost level line through a thick mountain.
I don't think Switzerland is going to use this system above ground. It most certainly will be deployed underground - long train tunnels are very common in Switzerland.
There was a project called Swissmetro [0] in 2005 which had a very similar concept to Hyperloop.
I don't think the Swiss are going to use it in their own country.
To me the article sounds like: we think it has potential and are going to see if we can make money out of it.
Edit: it can also be very interesting to see if it is cheaper and more confortable than 'low speed' trains.
Maybe in the future we use the hyperloops at 80km/h.
Everyone is talking about transporting humans with Hyperloop, but it doesn't make sense to me.
With internet, I cant think of a case where there is a need to be urgently, physically, transported from A to B anymore. Maybe weekend leisure trip would be more enjoyable with less travel time.
What I can imagine is an Amazon Hyperloop delivering goods and products faster from delivery center to consumers across countries. No problem about human sickness if there is no human transported. Also, maybe fresh foods like vegetables and fishes would benefit from a faster travel time.
EDIT : also, maybe it sounds silly but... what about transporting gold bars very fast?
What’s the point of transporting gold bars very quickly when we have plenty of financial instruments that can reliably represent gold bars that can be transmitted digitally?
That sensation is caused by vertical acceleration, ie. curvature, not by vertical speed. Controlling curvature is something that needs to be done anyway in the horizontal, I don't see why the vertical component would be harder to control for.
Because the land has vertical variations that you would have to work with, probably involving a lot of filling, bridging, and tunneling. The horizontal is just about planning the route. (Which of course has some restrictions as well, but not to the same extent.)
I was under the impression that a hyperloop would run mostly on pylons anyway, so just by varying their lengths it is possible to smooth the altitude however you want.
Agreed that pylons would let you filter out small changes, but in a place like Switzerland the land varies in height by a lot more than the average pylon.
The Dubai-Abu Dhabi hyperloop had a lot more potential.[1] Flat undeveloped desert along most of the route, the best case for a tube train. But the UAE government is backing off on support.
Nobody really wants to build Musk's hovercraft-like system. They're all maglev in vacuum systems.
Meanwhile, Japan's JR continues to tunnel for the Tokyo-Nagoya maglev. They have 42km of working track and rolling stock. It's expensive, but it's very real.
Air bearings are expensive and have a very low clearance (talking about tens of microns). The lower clearance raises the issue of safety. If I remember correctly, to get that to be greater than tens of microns you need larger compressors and lower operating pressure inside the tube which increases costs and it tougher to maintain.
If you take a look at the SpaceX Hyperloop competition the teams moved away from using air bearings mostly due to the low clearances and the challenges it brought. Maybe on Mars it could be more realistic.
I don't know why I didn't think about the clearance; that's a very good point. Does the low clearance affect maximum roughness and slope of the track as well?
[edit]
Did any of the hyperloop competitors try the addition of a skirt, similar to the UK's old hovertrain?
Swiss citizens travel more kilometers by rail per capita than any other country in the world. If you're going to implement a new form of public transit, they're a pretty good place to look.
> If you're going to implement a new form of public transit, they're a pretty good place to look.
Not really. Most of Switzerland's transit is through rail, particularly standard gouge. Introducing a completely new, incompatible form of transit in a highly integrated network is a bad idea. You have to build entirely new infrastructure, stations, etc. All of them incompatible with the existing infrastructure.
It is the same reasons why the Germans didn't chose Transrapid for high-speed rail.
New types of transportation only ever make sense in a place with no or little existing transit infrastructure.
A culture of public investment and use of transit is important. America's car-centric culture, for example, has been a major impediment to public transit projects here.
The Swiss network fairly seamlessly integrates multiple forms of transit into one network - both public and private rail, buses, boats, light rail, trams, etc. Bus stops are timed so the trains they connect to are there at the right time for a seamless switch.
Indeed, but the network benefits dramatically from - naturally - network effects.
Today you rarely ever see infrastructure projects in Switzerland which are incompatible with the existing network. If you build a hyperloop tunnel, only hyperloop cars will be able to use it, and only in the tunnel. If you build a rail tunnel, it is automatically integrated into the huge existing rail infrastructure.
Unless, of course, you built an entire new infrastructure, such as Japan and France did. But Switzerland doesn't need entirely new transit infrastructure today, just localized upgrades.
That's the same reason why maglev hardly ever caught up in the world.
You've already got folks hopping from IC trains to regional ones in the major cities. I'm not clear on why you think a hyperloop between major cities (eventually replacing the current high-speed lines) couldn't possibly interlink with the regional/local transit options at major stations.
> I'm not clear on why you think a hyperloop between major cities (eventually replacing the current high-speed lines)
Why would you replace perfectly good existing infrastructure that is used not just for high-speed rail in Switzerland with an entirely new, untested, incompatible system that will provide little incremental benefit while severely crippling the existing rail network?
High-speed rail lines in Switzerland aren't isolated, different-gauge networks like Japan, they are largely part of the same rail network, just with higher speed limits.
Take the new Gotthard Base Tunnel, while it has an operational speed of 200km/h for passenger rail, it is also extensively used for cargo trains (at lower speeds). Building it didn't just reduce the time for trips between Zurich and Milan, the main Nort-South route, but for anyone travelling from the north side of it to the south side of it, as current trains can run through it just as any other railroad.
Particularly, it has a massive impact on cargo, as it was designed from the beginning to reduce congestion in trans-alpine cargo routes. It provides massive network effects not just to Switzerland, but to all of Europe.
Replacing something like this with Hyperloop isn't just a bad idea, is a complete disaster.
Switzerland is probably the last country in the world to need something like a Hyperloop. No wonder we thought about it 50 years ago and shut down the idea:
Countries can take super long views of such projects. In 100+ years are people going to want super high speed rail?
If so, a little investment now can add up in the long term. This a long way from proven technology, but you make that jump in small investments not a complete replacement of a working system.
Even better, the first track is going to end up as a tourist destination.
It's worth noting that both France and Japan have a number of high-speed trains that run onto regular track -- although in Japan's case the different rail gauge made this difficult enough that neither approach (dual rails or flex trains) has been widely adopted.
Sure, the TGV is a standard-gauge set that can run in most of Western Europe's rail.
The issue is that regular rail can't run on the TGV lines.
Japan/France took a different approach than Germany/Switzerland for HSR. Germany and Switzerland are far less centralized than Japan and France, and that reflects in the network, which began as upgrades to lines between major cities, and new sections with new tracks.
France's system reflects its historical centralization, since the late middle ages. Paris is the economic, political, artistic, demographic center of the country, and just like the first railroads in the country were created to expand central control over the rest of the country, TGV started as a spoke network with a single hub: Paris.
Don’t know what you mean, Switzerland has no high speed rail worth speaking of. TGV and ICE have to drive slowly due to curves. If you’ve ever driven trains in Switzerland and compare to Shinkansen, it’s not even close.
[Corrected, with thanks! I hadn't read the German-language wikipedia page, and I don't recall hearing about the roots of the idea when it was in the news by 1993.]
A research and development project was funded and launched in the 90s, while the initial concept is credited to Swiss engineer Rodolphe Nieth in 1974.
Damn it feels super weird to hear something about my childhood village on HN.
There is also a recently closed refinery there. The funny thing is that they never budgeted the decommissioning cost when it was built. So there is no money to do it and it's probably going to stay like that forever.
Since both accelerating to 900kmh on such a short track and decelerating will involve multi-g forces, maybe this will be the most comfortable travel position.
Interesting! But presumably in this setup, one would experience both significant acceleration AND deceleration. Is there any static orientation that would minimize problems for both?
Well, sideways or rather upright (possibly in a seating position) is probably better but seems not very aerodynamic. I think those are the three possible orientations. But I mean are we seriously considering a transportation system where part of the journey is a black out/red out? The time gain by accelerating with 5g instead of 1g can't be that big (Maybe a few minutes at most?).
Edit: I'm not sure if there's an error in my calculations but with 1g acceleration it should take about 25s to get to 900km/h? That seems ok.
I agree with your calculations, but with an 1g acceleration for 25s, the train will travel a bit more than 3km, and getting to the end of the track (which is 3km according to the article) at close to 900km/h is unlikely to lead to a happy outcome.
If my math is right, in order to accelerate to 900km/h and decelerate to a stop again, all on a 3km track, requires acceleration/deceleration of a bit more than 2g.
I got to make some early promo photos for them [0] and signed a 10-year NDA in the process. However, what I learned (which is public knowledge) that at high speeds even smallest elevation drops would make the passengers feel the free-fall sensation of being on a rollercoaster. Basically at high speeds the elevation change of the vertical vector components of anything more than several degrees can approach the free fall dropping speeds.
I have also taken numerous train rides in Switzerland and driven through large parts of the country and I don't believe the technology can be used there as well as it could have been deployed in other routes in the world that is naturally more flat. So I'm wondering if this mostly an R&D project designed to export an entire tunnel/hyperloop making solution.
[0] https://www.instagram.com/p/BMiyAIdhCJn/ (photo is about 80 frames stacked. Because we only had one welder at the time and I had to reuse him and also to intricately light every parts of this lot)