The world’s fastest train under development
When inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk first proposed the idea to built a 760 mph train in August 2013, the idea seemed like something for a futuristic utopia.
After all, it would shrink the distance required to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco from six hours to a mere 30 minutes. That’s less than half the time it would take to fly by plane.
But the project has made real progress since then. On June 15, 2015, it was announced that a test track for the train, called the “Hyperloop,” is currently being built in California.
The track is being built by SpaceX, a company founded by Musk. The test track will be one-to-three miles long and four-to-five feet wide, and will be built outside SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
In an official SpaceX document, it was also announced that, “in order to accelerate the development of a functional prototype and to encourage student innovation, SpaceX is moving forward with a competition to design and build a half-scale Hyperloop pod.”
The competition will be judged as early as June 2016, with further details being released this August.
Additional progress towards the overall aesthetic of the train has also been made. In June 2015, Argo Design became the latest company to release a potential design for the interior of the train.
The design has the interior of the Hyperloop resembling that of a luxury plane, with large screens and keyboards for passengers to interact with.
In Argo’s plan, the walls of the Hyperloop will also be lined with large screens.
“We developed a concept for digital wall screens, called Tripscenes, to create a feeling of openness and discovery during travel,” said Argo designer Chipp Walters in an interview with the Daily Mail. “In this way, we turned the limitations of the capsule space into a key part of the journey’s appeal.”
Additionally, the team at Argo decided that they wanted to give the Hyperloop the capacity to carry passengers, vehicles, and cargo. They designed the train to be customizable according to its contents.
“To that end, we developed the concept of a capsule jukebox, which would lift capsules off the Hyperloop Sled and onto the departure/arrival platform,” said Chipp Walters in the same interview. “There they could be changed, configured, loaded, and unloaded. A second platform would be used for maintenance and loading of vehicles.”
Currently, no date has been set for when the official design will be chosen.
Information has been released about how the train will work, however: in August 2013, Elon Musk and engineers from SpaceX released a document available to the public that provided a detailed description of the train’s design.
The document described the train as travelling through a nearly airless, vacuum-like space. It will float on air above the ground to avoid interference from the surrounding terrain, and will be propelled by solar power and magnetic forces.
The train will travel at slightly less than the speed of sound to avoid harm to passengers.
At the time, Musk stated that he was too busy to tackle such a large project, so the document was open-sourced so that any company or engineer could work on it.
In the meantime, two companies, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Hyperloop Technologies were created for the task. Musk is not affiliated with either of these companies.
However, the companies are making progress: last month, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced that it planned to build a five-mile test track in California.
These plans come as welcome news to tired travellers. At a proposed cost of just $20 per person for a ticket, the Hyperloop could very well be the future of inexpensive, fast, and convenient travel.
With all these recent developments, progress towards the future is starting to accelerate.