RIP Hyperloop?

[Willbridge]

Hopefully this isn’t too dangerous off-topic, but that movie had the most realistic depiction of an ELE comet strike.

Back to the topic at hand, I’m very curious what the next gadgetbahn sensation will be.

Didn’t some info leak that musk basically pushed this idea to foil CAHSR or am I misremembering

As kids my grandparents gifted us the 1913 Book of Knowledge. At the end of the extensive section on railways it had a full-page picture of "The Wonderful Train That Is Coming" and it was an Alweg beam-supported monorail with McKeen Motor Car "windsplitter" front end. A Gibson girl was streaming her scarf in the wind through an open window.

So as kids we knew that the Seattle monorail had already been thought up five decades earlier, but they completely missed the invention of air-conditioning.

As an adult working in transportation I had to explain the issues with monorails and the Hyperloop a number of times. There was a group promoting Hyperloop for the Front Range corridor.

 

[George Harris]

RIP, but the real goal was to kill or at least delay public transit progress. And that has happened.
Can elected officials get back to planning and financing transportation projects that will actually work and serve the people?

That has been my suspicion for a lot of these, particularly as applied to California. It is dangling a carrot in front of the politicians, with, "Lookie, lookie at our wonderful ideas we have that the people that really have to make these things work will never think about."

Back to the topic at hand, I’m very curious what the next gadgetbahn sensation will be.

Didn’t some info leak that musk basically pushed this idea to foil CAHSR or am I misremembering?

That was my feeling at the time, and still is. I was working on the CAHSR at the time. One of the true tunnel experts made the comment, "He will probably end up having to call us once he gets to the mountains south of Bakersfield."

As I have said before, much of the supposed lower cost was achieved by ignoring a lot of the realities of construction and operation of tunnels. After all, we have been building tunnels in this world for well over 1,000 years.