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Is Richard Branson’s high-speed train in a pneumatic tube pie in the sky?

   The Observer
   Hyperloop

Is Richard Branson’s high-speed train in a pneumatic tube pie in the sky?

   First airlines, then spaceships. Now the Virgin boss wants to build
   Hyperloop One – a high-speed, pneumatic maglev railway. But engineering
   experts doubt that it will ever leave the station

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   expansion under direct sunlight, especially in the Californian desert.
   A 100km pipe could expand by as much as 50 metres in length,
   potentially undermining the system by allowing air in. High-speed
   railways cope with this by having rails that overlap at the ends, but
   this isn’t possible with hyperloop. Musk’s solution is to use expansion
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   Even if it can be shown to be safe, hyperloop also needs to be
   relatively comfortable. “Some people have called it the ‘barf tube’,
   because being accelerated at high speeds and then decelerated again is
   likely to make people sick,” says David Bailey, professor of industry
   at Aston Business School in Birmingham. This depends on the rate of
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   Those who have followed the twists and turns of selecting the route for
   HS2, England’s second high-speed rail network, planned to link London
   to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, will know that getting people to
   agree where to put overground infrastructure in densely populated
   countries is challenging. “In a crowded country where land is
   expensive, the potential problems for hyperloop would be like those of
   HS2 on steroids.”

   Such projects have to produce environmental impact assessments, which