Hyperloop is fantasy for the gullible and naive. It will never scale up into mass transit.
I think the problem is the initial cost and the ugly asthetics of the track is off-putting.
Apart from the sad fact that BR’s ‘scheme’ wasn’t accepted by the government (in the wake of a financial crisis) InterCity 250 hardly had the same breadth of vision as HS2. It wasn’t really about capacity in that it didn’t provide two new tracks all the way; it couldn’t have been expanded to include an eastern leg; it was for a lower top speed; it didn’t appear to envisage 400m trains and didn’t include strategic links via Old Oak Common, etc.
I love to use hyper loop for HS20 - we'll have to link it to HS21, the new cross channel hypertunnel, to take advantage of the speed. Or perhaps HS22, the transatlantic hypertunnel?
Welcome to the forum, with a fair question.
And it'd be an expensive taxi ride from OOC into central London, and subject to traffic delays. The Euston section, although expensive, is not particularly destructive as it's mostly in tunnel and it significantly adds to London terminal platform capacity. Having two London stations, in a city as large as a small country, makes a lot of sense. It is similar to the Shinkansen lines in Tokyo which both make a peripheral hub stop en route into the city centre terminus for a much wider range of total connections, including airport links.
I never thought I'd say this, but to be fair to Musk he never said this system was anything to do with 'Hyperloop'. It was always a rubber-tyred shuttle in a tunnel. The conference centre shuttle in LA sounds a pretty good idea to me, but I doubt it will be going 150mph for a short system with people standing up in small pods. Don't know what he's got about putting things in tubes and tunnels. Hyperloop is, in my mind likely to come up with an alternative maglev package of technology that could give German and Asian companies a run for their money if they'd just accept that train-sized is the way to go, not tiny pods, and drop the absurd vacuum pipe. He could adapt both the tyred low speed and maglev high speed designs for surface and tunnel routes and he might have a solid business in the far future, but non of this is remotely ready as a replacement for high speed railways and urban mass transit.
DynamicSpirit said:Would anyone be interested in setting up a group to campaign publicly for HS2?
It seems to me that there are a lot of well informed people on railforums, who have spent a lot of time putting forward good, rational, arguments for HS2 - particularly in this 'Why are people opposed to HS2?' thread. But having followed that thread for some time, I'd say many of us are basically wasting our time there, debating with other people who (mostly) already understand the arguments behind HS2. And while we're doing that, all the ill-informed anti-HS2 groups are active online much more publicly, on Twitter, in the media, etc. - spreading what many of us on railforums would recognise as misinformation.
To make it worse... we now have all the leadership machinations in the Tory Party, in which it looks like several Tory leadership contenders might try to axe HS2 in order to make themselves more popular inside the Tory Party. And the Brexit party is looming large... Nigel Farage has never as far as I can see been a fan of either HS2 or of factual accuracy.
I'm therefore thinking a more productive use of some of time would be to campaign away from railforums UK (hard concept I know) for HS2 (and perhaps for sensible rail improvements generally) on the basis of communicating accurate information about what HS2 is likely to achieve. Ideally, I'm thinking of a campaigning group that would have its own website, and which could respond quickly online to the various bits of idiocy that hit the media (such as the recent Taxpayers Alliance proposal to divert funds from HS2). And perhaps even starting to do things like leaflet commuters on rail lines that stand to benefit from HS2. Although those are only rough ideas - I'm open to other ideas.
Anyone interested? If so, I'd say, either discuss here, or (better) PM me.
Because many of those know that acknowledging the capacity issue, undermines their objections to the project. Their approach to debate on the matter is to keep playing the broken record of "Westminster's vanity project that gets rich Londoners to Birmingham 5 minutes quicker". There's the routine inflation of the projected cost, - I've seen figures as high as £140bn citing other projects that have cost overruns as 'proof', and how this money could be spent on hospitals, education, and dozens of other rail projects that they would personally benefit from. It's as big a delusion as the £350m on the side of the big red bus.
