Transfer over, Elon Musk and Richard Branson: A Canadian firm desires to affix the struggle for higher high-speed prepare journey.
Toronto-based TransPod just lately unveiled plans for a “FluxJet,” a fully-electric transportation system that is “a hybrid between an plane and a prepare.” The mission, presently within the conceptual stage, would contain 82-foot-long, magnetically levitated trains that may carry passengers at roughly 621 miles per hour.
That is quicker than a business jet, and roughly thrice the velocity of most high-speed trains — with zero emissions, no much less. The FluxJet would depend on “contactless energy transmission,” the place the prepare would pull energy from the present electrical grid by way of magnetic fields, the corporate says.
The levitating prepare’s aerodynamic design is supposed to scale back friction. However the FluxJet’s theoretical skill to outpace jets and high-speed trains rests on know-how influenced by “veillance flux,” a comparatively new area of physics. The corporate launched a video in July displaying off the FluxJet’s design course of, together with fast seems to be at how the know-how works and idea animations displaying what the ultimate model may finally appear like:
TransPod says the price for passengers to journey on the FluxJet shall be 44% lower than the price of a airplane ticket. To begin, the corporate plans to construct an almost 200-mile vacuum tube community between the Canadian cities of Edmonton and Calgary.
Beneath this plan, trains would depart each two minutes and carry as much as 54 passengers and 10 tons of cargo on every journey. The 175-mile journey between the 2 cities would take simply 45 minutes, the corporate says.
An $18 billion enterprise
That is the excellent news. The unhealthy information is that even optimistically, this transit system is a few years and billions of {dollars} away.
The company says it wants to begin construction on its inter-city FluxJet line by 2027. TransPod also says the project will ultimately cost $18 billion, which means it’ll need to raise a lot more money between now and then — whether from private investors, government funding or both.
TransPod claims the expenditure will be well worth it, projecting that the FluxJet system’s construction will create “up to 140,000 jobs” and add $19.2 billion to the area’s gross domestic product (GDP). The system would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 636,000 tons per year once constructed, TransPod says.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One previously announced plans for a similar ultra-high-speed gliding train system, intended to ferry human passengers at speeds up to 760 miles per hour. Virgin’s prototype floating pods have so far topped out at roughly 240 miles per hour in tests, and the company recently laid off 111 staffers while refocusing on transporting freight instead of people.
Similarly, Elon Musk’s The Boring Company has been digging underground tunnels in Los Angeles and Las Vegas for years now — hoping to eventually fill them with high-speed “hyperloop” transportation systems that move passenger pods at speeds above 600 miles per hour.
So far, the tunnels have only been used to transport Tesla vehicles, at speeds topping out at roughly 50 miles per hour. Musk tweeted in April that he desires to start “full-scale testing” of a hyperloop later this yr.
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