The London and Edinburgh Vacuum Tunnel Company report is accompanied by a small notice: "The foregoing Jeu d'Esprit appeared in a recent number of the Edinburgh Star, and being well calculated to throw ridicule upon some of the preposterous plans now before the public for the investment of money, we insert it in the Register".
The London Pneumatic Despatch Company actually built a system of pneumatic tube tunnels under London in the 1860s that were capable of carrying people:
At my first job we ran a small scale pilot system near milton Keynes to test Pneumatic systems for industrial uses.
My colleagues in that department some times had to crawl 1/4 of a mile in the tunnels to unstick the capsules! - that is why I chose the mathematical modeling section
Was it safe? I mean was there any chance that the system could be turned on and injure the person crawling?
I was trying to imagine a 1/4 mile crawl in a small tube as an engineer and was just thinking, "NOPE." but if I had built the system and it was near 100% safe, maybe...
I presume they used standard safety procedures (Lockout/Tagout) everyone working in the tunnel locked the controls to off with their own lock and took the key with them into the tunnel.
Interesting, the mail office actually used this for some time, but to quote the article:
"The Edinburgh Evening News reported in 1876 that the trucks containing the parcels continually stuck in the tunnels, and this was the reason for the failure of the company."
"The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage is worth reading if you are interested in this. It is mostly about telegraph, but includes tube systems. The obvious comparisons with the contemporary world are fascinating.
It seems pretty obvious to me that some variant on the vacuum maglev train is the long-term solution to travel on Earth. It's the only way, really, to get past the air problem. I doubt we'll ever see mass supersonic transport - a far riskier and more inefficient game of fluid dynamics russian roulette.
It's not going to happen overnight, though. We're waiting on a few technological breakthroughs before it becomes viable. Fully automated robotic tunnelling and construction, for one. Automated manufacturing of those robots. Much improved materials science, probably nanotech-enabled. But when these technologies come, it's inevitable that we build such a network.
The time isn't right for vactrains but it will be eventually. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed - and this particular future has been creeping forward for literally centuries. Give it a few more decades and we'll see the real hyperloop!
"Passengers instead ride in traditional railway carriages on tracks affixed on top of the tunnel or tube. These passenger cars are coupled by strong magnets to the freight-carrying cars. As the freight train zooms through the tunnel or tube, its magnetic field drags the passenger train along on what is sure to be a rapid and exciting ride."
Clever! Not backed by calculations there in the article, but clever and amazing nonetheless.
Before steam engines became / turned out to be practical to place in a moving vehicle, there were railroads powered by pneumatic tubes so the heavy machinery could be stationary. The pneumatic tube was between the rails and it had a leather seam sealed slit all the way. The "locomotive" was attached to the piston in the tube with a vane going through the slit.
That's basically how aircraft carrier launchers work too. There's a long pneumatic tube with a piston running the length of the runway, and huge boilers that build up a lot of steam pressure behind the piston. The piston is attached to a little block on the deck, and the airplane is hooked into the block. Release the piston, and the piston and block shoot down the runway dragging the airplane with it.
Would freight hyperloops make more sense than those for people?
Trains are still the cheapest form of freight transport in the US, but I assume radically faster speeds + even cheaper costs + lower pollution and environmental impact would generate a net win for a freight hyperloop. Freight doesn't care about inconveniences like lack of toilets or being cramped. Do the benefits begin to rapidly erode under much greater weight, or will that scale?
I'm not sure that speed matter for a lot of freight. Fresh food, perhaps. But a lot of stuff is shipped around the world on shipping containers that take weeks to get to their destination, and no-one particularly seems to care.
Aside from the issues with perishables (of which fresh food isn't the only kind), delivery times for inputs (and finished goods to the market) combined with inventory (which has a cost) constrain response times to changing market conditions; how important this is depends on the market and the other constraints on response times in that market.
Apparently (I'm no expert but my Dad is) it makes far more sense to transport people by train and goods by car. People will autonomously complete the rest of their journey when dropped at a station, but goods will not.
I'd personally like more local storage depos. And keep freight off of the road during the day. Night time would also be a good time to shift freight. The last mile could be done with a small electric vehicle, or over pneumatic tubes.
What makes buses and trains so attractive is that they take up far less space (if filled) compared with say a car carrying one passenger.
It might be too late in the UK to get cargo and freight back on the canals. Also our local post offices are being closed down, which would be the natural choice for a local pickup point. I for one wouldn't mind a text to say I have a parcel to go and collect. I'd probably be happy collecting my mail once a week (bar the spam.)
Side tracking further, I heard some old dears the other day, lamenting that they could no longer afford to send xmas cards. It now costs about a dollar to send mail by first class.
Freight doesn't care about speed, and does care about how much mass and volume you can transport. The capacity of the hyperloop capsules is tiny compared to a modern train.
That's not true. Freight consumers care a lot about speed. Think of it like a triangle and each corner is cost, reliability, and time. Each one pulls on the other as a decision process in the supply chain.
Just an aside. The Musk Hyperloop is not a pneumatic tube. The pnuematics in Musk's Hyperloop is to reduce friction and provide stability. It's not for propulsion. Musk's Hyperloop is more akin to an air hockey table.
Assuming it never goes above 5g (which from googling seems to be a realistic maximum sustained g-force limit), it would roughly mean accelerating at 5g for 1 minute, followed by 3 minutes of 6600mph, followed by 5g deceleration for 1minute
Yeah that would be an intense minute, followed by 3 minutes of terrifying anticipation, followed by some nasty seat-belt marks. Had they invented the 4-point harness in 1825?
There have been many variations of these basic ideas for a while.
Hyperloop is different in that it does not require a full vacuum, but just a low-pressure atmosphere, which make the tubes much cheaper to build an maintain. It also does not require magnetic levitation along the full length of the tube (like the Chinese proposal uses), as it uses an air cushion provided by that a compressor that sucks in that low-pressure atmosphere, further reducing the cost of building the tube. It merely uses occasional magnetic linear motors spaced out along the route to accelerate and decelerate the pod, spending most of its time coasting on its air cushion.
So, while it does share design features with many previously proposed systems, it is not exactly the same as what has been proposed before. There's a good reason why people have been talking about evacuated tube transport for centuries but no one has actually achieved it on a practical scale; the hope is that the low-pressure design will be much cheaper than the evacuated tube design.
Now, I am somewhat skeptical of the incredibly low numbers that Elon Musk quotes, especially relative to the much more well understood high-speed rail he's comparing it to. But you shouldn't dismiss it just because there are some superficial similarities to previously proposed systems; as far as I know (and I haven't done much research, so I could be wrong), this is the first such system that proposes using low pressure, a compressor on the front of the pod to deal with the problem of the air mass not being able to flow around it, and an air cushion to support the pod taking advantage of the air taken in by the compressor.
I wonder how radically different transportation would be today had one of these systems been built. Even if it was in the early 1900's, it be a huge leap forward in technology.
The London and Edinburgh Vacuum Tunnel Company report is accompanied by a small notice: "The foregoing Jeu d'Esprit appeared in a recent number of the Edinburgh Star, and being well calculated to throw ridicule upon some of the preposterous plans now before the public for the investment of money, we insert it in the Register".