Train systems are a lifeline in many nations across the globe. They carry millions of passengers everyday from one place to another. The super famous billionaire Elon Musk wants to get rid of the old, slow railway systems in order to design a new one where travellers will complete the journey of hours in minutes. And he plans to do this with the help of ‘Hyperloop’ which is a series of vacuum tubes that will turn the dream of cutting down the travelling time of hours to minutes into reality.
Since Musk didn’t have the time to do so, he did what he could easily do, use his money to make it happen. In 2013, he open-sourced the project for anyone; who was interested in working on it. And look less than three years later, the dream is turning into reality.
How does Hyperloop work?
It works on a simple principle, the same principle that enabled businesses to send papers across large buildings using vacuum tube networks. Hyperloop is the same thing; with papers substituted by people and inter building distances substituted by cross-country ones. The tube is six feet wide and is maintained as a low-pressure environment (not a true vacuum). The passenger pod will not exactly touch the tube but will float slightly above it either using a cusion of air or magnetic levitation.
How will it change commuting?
You can easily understand that Hyperloop is like just another maglev train but because it doesn’t have to deal with so much air resistance, it can gain much higher top speeds as high as 750mph (double of Japan’s record-breaking maglev running at 366mph). So if a network if Hyperloop trains were ever to be built across the United States, it will render the domestic short-haul airline industry redundant. For example, if you want to get from New York to Washington, DC, it’ll take you just under three hours on Amtrak’s Acela Express — which is what passes for high-speed rail in the US.
You could also take a flight, which would take an hour and 15 minutes, plus the time spent at security, the gate, and baggage claim. That same journey with Hyperloop is expected to take just half an hour. Apart from drastically slashing down the travelling time of people, hyperloop can also help ease the freight traffic. If 18-wheeler cargo containers, instead of driven on roads were to be pushed via Hyperloop, it would diminish thousands of road journeys and maybe potential accidents.
The two contenders: After Elon Musk announced the open-sourcing of this Hyperloop project, the two strongest companies that jumped in the arena were Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Hyperloop Technologies, both based in Los-Angeles. Let us discuss these two companies.
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT)
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) is a crowdsourced engineering project led by German entrepreneur Dirk Ahlborn. Scientists and engineers at HTT have agreed to donate their time and expertise, collaborating with one another online to refine the Hyperloop technology. Bulk of its team members have day jobs at legitimate science and engineering outfits like Tesla, SpaceX and NASA. Each person who gets involved is rewarded with the promise of stock options in whatever corporate entity is formed in the future.
