After everything I’ve seen with tofu-dreg construction like that bridge collapsing this last week, I think I’ll pass on riding a nearly supersonic Chinese train.
At 1000 km/hr, it’d run out of track in less than four minutes, hope it can stop in time … Anyway not convinced there’s much point in this. China should be building more suburban rail networks to fill the gaps, instead of pouring so much concrete into crazy-wide highways and toll-roads (look on satellite image, you’ll see).
Except the concept is already “proven” in that regard. What the issues are with it, are the same as with everything techy that needs to make it in the world - scaling it up.
It’s impossible to hold a vacuum in a tube that’s hundreds of kilometers long. It is impossible to build a vacuum tube that doesn’t suffer because of thermal expansion. It is impossible to build that long of a tube and it not have a single dent in it across the entire way. Even if you somehow ignore physics, people don’t need a train like this. There is flights. Travelling at reasonable speed has been proven for hundreds of years.
To explain it in a tldr way, I can grab a straw, put a wet tissue inside it, blow on it and in relative speeds it would go incredibly fast. Yet nobody would go for trying that with a train, since scaling it is impossible.
Remember when Elon Musk used hyperloop and boring company to build nothing in the US as a way to shut down public transportation efforts?
Norway has enough money to build one from Kirkenes to Kristiansand. But they never will.
