The new line is scheduled to fully open in autumn September 15, — A rush hour blast caused by an improvised explosive device on a London Underground train at Parsons Green station injures at least 30 people in what police call a terrorist incident. Project leaders expect the new line to begin running in early , almost four years behind schedule. All rights reserved. You must be logged in to post a comment.
By CNN Newsource. CNN Here's some background information about the London Underground, also known as "The Tube," the oldest subway or metro transit system in the world. The entrance to Westminster underground station in London. There are currently stations open and miles km of active lines. There are a number of old stations and tunnels that are now closed. Read More. Some stations are under the jurisdiction of the BTP and local police agencies.
Forty thousand passengers ride the Underground on the first day. Piccadilly Line opens dark blue on the map. November 18, - A fire at King's Cross station is caused by a burning match falling onto a wooden-tread escalator panel. Thirty-one people die in the fire. July 7, - Four suicide bombers detonate themselves aboard three Tube trains and a bus during morning rush hour, killing 52 people and injuring around It's also potentially two or three times faster than even high-speed rail and ten times the speed of regular rail services.
Musk envisioned an LA to San Francisco journey time of half an hour with pod departures every 30 seconds, each carrying 28 passengers. Critics of Hyperloop have warned that travelling in the tube might be an uncomfortable experience, due to nausea-inducing acceleration, plus lateral G-force on bends in the route.
However, Virgin Hyperloop One says that a journey via Hyperloop will feel about the same as riding in an elevator or a passenger plane. Acceleration and deceleration will be gradual, it added, with no G-forces and turbulence. Travelling in a concrete pipe in a windowless pod means there isn't going to be much to look at; Musk's original vision said that "beautiful landscape will be displayed in the cabin" and each passenger will have access their own personal entertainment system. That's the huge, multibillion dollar -- and, as yet, unanswered -- question around Hyperloop.
The concept has been around for a long time, but until now the technology has been lacking. This time around, it's possible that the technology may have just caught up with the concept.
There are well-funded companies racing to be the first to deliver a working service but, despite their optimistic timescales, these projects are still very much in the pilot and experimental stages. Going from short test routes to hundreds of kilometres of track is a big jump that none of these firms has made yet. If the technology is still in development, that's also very true of the business models to support it. The success of Hyperloop will vary depending on the destinations, local economics, and geography.
Trying to build a new line overland across England, for example, can prove an expensive and complicated business which can take many years as the ongoing HS2 controversy has shown.
In other countries where land is cheaper or where routes can travel through less populated areas, it may be easier to get services up and running faster. Capacity is another issue. It's not clear that Hyperloop can do a better job of moving a large number of people than other mass transit options. Critics argue that lots of pods will be required to achieve the same passenger numbers as more traditional rail, which uses much bigger carriages. And there are many engineering hurdles to overcome, like building the tubes strong enough to deal with the stresses of carrying the high-speed pods, and finding energy- and cost-efficient ways to keep them operating at low pressure.
Moving from a successful test to a full commercial deployment is a big jump, and passenger trials are still to come. Assuming that consumers are happy being zoomed around in these tubes, finding the right price for the service will be vital, too. Right now Hyperloop is at an experimental stage, even if the companies involved are very keen to talk about its potential. Why hyperloop is poised to transform commutes, commerce, and communities.
Elon Musk may have popularized the concept, but multiple teams are racing to deploy hyperloop routes at key spots across the globe. The companies building Hyperloop services argue that they are significantly cheaper to build than high-speed rail services. Musk's Hyperloop Alpha paper claimed his LA to San Francisco route could be built for one-tenth of the price of a high-speed rail alternative.
Other companies have said their services could be one-third to half the price of rail services and much faster. Being cheaper to build should mean these services can become profitable quickly. However, there are plenty of engineering challenges to be tackled which could push the costs up, and how these services will be funded in the first place is not clear; many of the feasibility studies under way are looking at how to finance them, likely through a combination of public and private investment.
Rather than keeping the Hyperloop to himself, Musk threw the idea open to anyone who wanted to develop it, comparing it to the Linux operating system: an open-source design built by a community of developers in order to bring it from concept to reality. Indeed, in his Hyperloop Alpha paper, Musk noted that a number of areas still remained to be resolved including the control mechanism for Hyperloop capsules; station designs with loading and unloading of both passenger and passenger-plus-vehicle versions of the Hyperloop capsules; comparisons of Hyperloop with more conventional magnetic levitation systems; and testing to demonstrate the physics of Hyperloop.
Despite doing much to lay the groundwork for Hyperloop services, Musk initially said he was too busy to develop his own service. There are now a number of companies working to turn the idea into reality, including startups and others that have been working on the idea for some time already.
Each is developing a slightly different set of technologies, but the fundamental underlying idea remains the same. Despite saying he was too busy, it looks like Musk remains intrigued by the idea of Hyperloop: last year he said that he had received 'verbal approval' for a New York to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington DC Hyperloop, which would cut the New York to Washington DC travel time to just 29 minutes. In October , Maryland's Department of Transportation also gave conditional approval to the construction of a Boring Company tunnel from Baltimore to Washington , allowing it to dig under state roads.
In April , the company provided more details on its plans for the Washington DC to Baltimore section -- it aims to build a high-speed Loop underground transportation system that transports passengers in autonomous electric vehicles, or AEVs, at speeds of up to miles per hour. It adds that the Loop tunnels could potentially serve as Hyperloop corridors, which could potentially transport passengers at speeds of up to miles per hour.
However, it warned: "The potential future use of Hyperloop technology is currently unknown. Musk set up the Boring Company with the aim of making it easier and faster to dig the tunnels under, and between, cities in order to make Hyperloop projects viable. The company says it can do this by digging smaller tunnels, making faster and more efficient digging machines, and replacing diesel-powered machines with electric ones.
As well as building more efficient digging machines, the Boring Company also offered a line of caps and more unusually flame throwers, both of which sold out rapidly after they were released.
The tunnel is expected to be operational by the end of the year. The Boring Company hopes that one use for these tunnels, as well as Hyperloops, will be Loop. This is a high-speed underground public transportation system which sees passengers carried on autonomous electric 'skates' travelling at to miles per hour.
Electric skates will carry between eight and 16 passengers or a single passenger vehicle. Passengers and vehicles would enter the pods at street level and then elevators would drop them down to the level of the Loop to continue the journey underground, bypassing street traffic with pedestrians and cyclists getting priority over cars.
The company is currently working on an initial test tunnel in Hawthorne near the SpaceX and the Boring Company HQ and has submitted plans for a 6. The company said that unlike a subway, there is no practical upper limit to the number of stations that can be built along the tunnel route, as stations can be as small as a single parking space because the service is accessed via lifts.
Each Loop 'station' is made up of a bank of elevators to transport the skates to and from ground level. It has published a map showing a potential set of routes for the service. Musk's SpaceX has its own Hyperloop test track at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California -- about one mile long and with a six-foot outer diameter. In order to accelerate the development of functional prototypes and encourage student innovation, SpaceX announced the Hyperloop Pod Competition in , which challenges university teams to design and build the best transport pod, judged by different criteria each time.
In , the focus was the maximum speed for a self-propelled pod on the test track, or as the competition puts it: "Fastest time without crashing wins! In it was judged on maximum speed with successful deceleration.
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