Vacuum trains: a high-speed pipe dream? (BBC Future) [View all]

[eppur_se_muova]

Jon Stewart

Transatlantic passengers on Concorde often referred to the supersonic plane as their “time machine” for its ability to land in New York two hours before it left London.

But that kind of illusion could look like child’s play if so-called vacuum trains ever take off.

These futuristic transporters, designed to hurtle through tunnels that have had all of the air sucked out of them, could theoretically hit speeds of up to 4,000 km/h (2,500 mph), cutting the commute from Europe to North America to just one hour. In this high-speed future, passengers would arrive a full four hours before they set off.

As with all far out technology, it sounds like science fiction. And, in fact, vacuum trains do feature in movies like Star Trek and Logan’s Run. Whilst in the dystopian future of Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury describes a “silent air-propelled train” that “slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the earth”.

But these are far from fiction, as we found out when Future reader Seb Gibbs suggested we look into them here at Hyperdrive. Today, there are teams in the US, China and elsewhere working on the concept, with some predicting their arrival within 10 years. Whilst others believe that they could offer a potentially cheap route to launch rockets into space.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120601-high-speed-pipedreams/1