Evacuated Tube Transport / VACTRAIN

[Deadstring67]

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Feasibility and Economic Aspects of Vactrains



In the middle of 1800s, the United States built the transcontinental railroad to get people and products across the country. By today’s standards it was a slow way to go – about 8 days to get from Omaha to San Francisco. At the time, however, the transcontinental railroad was a technological marvel. The same trip in a covered wagon took six months if things went well. When they didn’t go well, it often meant death. Compared to a dangerous six month journey, eight days in a train seemed like light speed.
In the middle of the 1900s, trains were replaced by jet airplanes. Now a person could fly from New York to Los Angeles in six hours, at 550 miles per hour. At the time this too seemed like a technological marvel. But here we are 50 years later, and nothing has really changed. The obvious question is: What’s next?
One possibility is supersonic travel. Supersonic passenger airplanes currently cannot fly over land in the United States because of the sonic booms that they create. But new technologies could soon give us supersonic planes that do not have sonic booms.



However, supersonic planes are not really the answer. First, they will be limited in their speed to 1,000 to 1,500 MPH. While that is much faster than today’s jets, it is not revolutionary.
The second problem is the cost per passenger. As the speed of a plane increases, so does the amount of fuel required to overcome air resistance. When the supersonic Concorde jet was flying, it took six times more fuel per passenger than a 747 to get through the air. Thus the Concorde was too expensive for most people to afford.
The ultimate solution is likely to be a vactrain, also known as Evacuated Tube Transport or ETT. In a vactrain system, a magnetically levitated train moves through a vacuum-sealed tube. The vacuum means no air resistance, and the magnetic levitation means no resistance from wheels or tires. Removing these two sources of drag creates two huge benefits. First it means that the train can go incredibly fast – with a top speed of 5,000 miles per hour. Second it means that the amount of energy required to move the train is very small. There are new energy costs to maintain the vacuum and to cool and power the magnets, but these energy costs are minimal compared to a jet.



The bottom line is that a vactrain between New York and Los Angeles would allow people to commute from one city to the other if they wanted to. The travel time would be less than an hour, and the price of a ticket would be low.



The only real constraints on a vactrain system are: 1) the need to construct the tube, and 2) the need to keep the track straight. At 5,000 miles per hour, only the gentlest of turns are possible or passengers would feel the G-forces. A right turn, for example, might cover several big states. On land, a vactrain system could be put underground in tunnels, or it could go in steel or concrete tubes above ground. To cross an ocean, the tube might be anchored with cables on the ocean floor, with the tunnels floating mid-ocean, as demonstrated in this video:











The idea of a vactrain system that crosses the United States is exciting. But the global picture is even more interesting. With a vactrain system circling the planet, it is easy to imagine travel from the U.S. to China taking only 2 hours. New York to London might take only an hour or so. The system could carry both passengers and cargo, so shipping times and costs could be drastically reduced.
A vactrain system circling the globe might sound far-fetched today, in the same way that transcontinental jets would have sounded far-fetched in 1900. But there is already research underway in China to bring an early version of a vactrain to market. This first system would have only a partial vacuum, but would allow trains to travel up to 600 MPH. China already has hundreds of miles of high speed rail traveling at 200 MPH, and a vactrain would lower travel times significantly.

Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies : et3 Network : Space Travel on Earth™

[lifestar]

if ma tinuod ni, daghan jud kaau ni ug benefits at the same time daghan pud ug drawbacks..hehe

[siopao1984]

biha jud ni si TS oi. daghan jud maukay. i have learned a lot from u!

kudos. keep it up. nahan ko sa mga threads mo. interesting.

[justinblake]

Nindota gud ani...When kaha ni maabot sa Cebu...lols...

[Deadstring67]

biha jud ni si TS oi. daghan jud maukay. i have learned a lot from u!

kudos. keep it up. nahan ko sa mga threads mo. interesting.

thanks bro.. hehe

[Deadstring67]

Nindota gud ani...When kaha ni maabot sa Cebu...lols...

ma dugay2x pa jd bro.. worst dili jd. hehe

[Deadstring67]

Shrinking the Atlantic Ocean – A Case of Transatlantic Superspeed VacTrain

The idea of it was first proposed by Michel Verne in his book in 1888, a son of the famous French science fiction author Jules Verne. But it was not until 60ies when engineering visionaries started to get into the science of building a transatlantic superspeed vac-train (TSV). The idea is spectacular and audacious, as well as unimaginably hard and expensive by today’s capacities and costs.

A TSV train would hover above the track without physically touching it thanks to the magnets, eliminating the rail friction altogether (which limits the train speed). Magnetic levitation train is no longer a science fiction; such train already has been serving a route between Shanghai city and its airport since 2004. Different from a conventional maglev train, TSV would be moving in a vacuum tunnel submerged and fixed 50 meters above the bottom of Atlantic Ocean (shown on the picture), eliminating another source of friction - air. By eliminating two sources of friction, air and rail track, the train will be able to accelerate up to the speed of 8000 km/h allowing the train to cover a distance of 5000 kilometers between London and New York in just 54 minutes, shrinking the time and space between two continents (it would take 20 minutes to reach the full speed and same time to slow down to make the journey comfortable for passengers. This is the reason why it would take about 54 minutes to travel and not less).



Different sources estimate the cost of project from $175 billion up to staggering $12 trillion making the project unimaginable to be embraced by any current government. For a comparison, average cost of building a 500 km HSR track in Europe is estimated to be around 10 billion EUR (operational costs not included). This number doesn’t even reach the lowest proposed cost of $175 billion. However, as the engineering and material sciences evolve and advance, costs will be pushed down to a point where undertaking such venture might even become possible. In spite of all costs, uncertainties, technical feasibility, risks associated with under water travel (which is way outside of the scope of this article), I think it would still be interesting to look into the socio-economic impacts of such a grandiose undertaking should it one day become a reality.

The Japanese and European experiences show that HSR trains that cover the distances between two cities in less than 2.5 hours can obtain 80-90% of all air traffic and 50% if HSR train covers the distance in less than 4.5 hours. TSV easily meets this requirement. Financial Times in 2009 listed London – New York flight as the third busiest international route with annual number of passengers slightly over 1,6 million. By transporting 80-90% of those passengers, TSV will be one of the busiest train routes on earth.

High Speed Rail (HSR) projects almost never cover their infrastructure and operational costs and are therefore financed by tax payers’ money. Such spending is always justified by the wider social and economic benefits HSRs bring. These are passenger time savings, reduction in congestion, reduction in accidents, reduction in environmental externalities and benefits including the development of the less developed regions. Historically, United States and UK have favored HSR projects much less than other European countries, Japan or China. However, if such project was ever given a green light by British and American governments, TSV would make impossible possible and have a number of wide scale social and economic effects on two cities.

A study on UK’s InterCity 125/225, a HSR network, has shown that towns that became reachable from London within 1 and 2 hours, had higher employment rates as well as gross value added per head after the construction of HSR line. Employment increase was highest in knowledge intensive business services and creative industries. Reason for this is the high cost of tacit knowledge exchange in spite of advancement of information and communication technologies. Therefore, New York and London, two hubs of advanced and high value added service industries have very high potential to benefit from a TSV. Cutting a travel time between two cities from 7 hours (by air) to 54 minutes would enable more frequent business meetings, increase working hours of business travelers and as a result increase the productivity of firms. Extent of productivity will also depend on ticket costs, whether every day commuting would be possible, uniting two job markets into one, increasing the size of the labor market pool and enabling workers to move from less productive to more productive jobs between two cities. These two cities as agglomerated as they already are would become even more competitive, with firms having larger markets and enjoying the scale economies. As world’s two financial centers, these cities probably have most in common than any other two cities in different countries. By having similar physical size and economies, as well as identical intellectual resources and endowments, these two cities could benefit from a shared and united market most. On the negative side, as the output of these two cities would increase, so would the congestion and office rents, which already pose enormous problems to respective city officials.

As history has already shown, often impossible can quickly become possible. So who knows maybe one day it will really be possible to have lunch on Manhattan and still make it to London for an evening theatre performance.