Great Western Coffee Shop

From the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54838982)


Astonishingly, no thread that I can find that's specific to Hyperloop - just a few passing references.  So I have started this.   Is Hyperloop really a "railway" subject? ....

I am very doubtfull indeed about this.
The passenger carying pods will run in a tube containing vaccuum, and will therefore need to be pressure tight and carry a reserve of air, and means of removing carbon dioxide, More like a spacecraft than a train. Any failure of the pressurisation will quickly suffocate the passengers.
And how are thousands of miles of vaccuum tube to be kept air tight ? Even a slight imperfection will destroy the vaccuum. Any defect in a tube below water, or below the water table on land will fill the tube with water.
The capsules presumably cant move through water, so everyone suffocates in the sealed capasule, or excapes and drowns.

Very silly idea IMHO.

Sounds like something a bloke called Brunel tried in South Devon in the 19th century. That didn't end well ether.

I like the highest-rated comment on the BBC article from someone called Supersub:

Maybe not. Anything that's expensive to set up, and has to recover that cost from users, has to find the right price point. There may be more than one viable solution, most likely just two: high cost/low usage and a low cost/high usage. However, the limited pod size, and lack of a "cheap" way of scaling capacity up, may limit usage numbers - or at least provide a barrier to doing that. In that case only the high cost option would exist, and it would be more like a decarbonised business jet. Only for rather short distances, of course.

I guess any subsidence or earthquake anywhere along the route is going to put the tubes out of alignment (if not damaged) and out of action for a long time.

It's sobering to think that 2 rails laid a fixed distance apart  with vehicles with flanged wheels has been around for over 200 years. Whilst Atmospheric, Monorails, Magnetic Levitation, Guided Bus ways, Hyperloops etc. have met with only limited success and have been confined to end to end operations rather than part of a network.

Yes, but you are being very selective in quoting only those systems that have been very limited. 

As well as paired rails with flanged wheels, there has been some network success for vehicles with tyred wheels running of flat even(ish) surfaces, and for vehicles lighter than water resting on the surface of that water with some displacement beneath, self powered across the water.  There are also vehicles which go very fast and lift into the air using aerofoils  with a whole network of places they can come back down.

Take your point Grahame but I was thinking mainly of systems that required the buiding of infrastructure for guidance.

Well, I think it's worth a look. We would need to start small. Parson Street to Bedminster maybe? With WRECA involved, it could be done in as little as 25 years. (Without them, that could be cut to a decade.)

Not the first passenger railway like this ... see the Crystal Palace pneumatic railway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_pneumatic_railway)

What do you mean, "like this"? There is a huge difference between using a vacuum to propel a train outside a tube, and using it to reduce air resistance for a train inside the tube (propelled otherwise). It's like pointing out a steam-hauled train with electric lighting and claiming it's the same as electric traction!

(?) Not sure - for sure a difference of degree - sucking a bit of air out v sucking most of the air out.  Opposite ends of the same spectrum perhaps? I note on the Beach Pneumatic Transit page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit)

It's 8.7m long, and travelled up and down a 500m track in a desolate wasteland. This has cost their investors $400m.

Should we tell them you can get the same experience in the UK for one pound 40 (http://www.brfares.com/#!fares?orig=SBJ&dest=SBT)?

How did I know which journey you had in mind even before I clicked on the link?  ;D

And without risk of suffocating, as surrounded by air. And almost no risk of drowning unless very unlucky.

Following the precedent set by more precursors than you probably imagine (see Wikipedia's pneumatic tube article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube)), Virgin Hyperloop is falling back from people-whizzing to smaller tubes and urgent parcels. From roadshow by cnet (https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/virgin-hyperloop-lays-off-employees-scratches-plans-for-passenger-transport-says-report/):

Most of those precedents fell back even further to little canisters for letters and cash - but somehow it's hard to see either of those giving an enticing BCR these days.

Our local Tesco was built with a tube system linking all the checkouts to a central cashier's office, which surprised me, being as recent as about 1996. I was even more surprised to see it still being used a couple of months ago, though only to send in a slip printed by the till at operator handover.

“Lamson Pneumatic Tubes”

Tech still available from this firm: https://www.quirepace.co.uk/

Who are apparently in Fareham…

I think they still use them to transport quantities of Hand Money, or whatever it is called. Seemingly, one of the customers at my local megastore still doesn't have a plastic card to pay with.

And Lamsons started off making the other kind of cash carrier, with a little carriage running along wires. I have a vague recollection of seeing one of those systems, most likely at Gamages (where there certainly was one) or perhaps Hamleys. They were obviously the kind of London shops a little boy would be taken to in the 1950s.

I also remember the tubes, which certainly were used in Bentalls in Ealing. All of those 50s ones would be operating the original method, where the receipt form and money (or cheque) would get sent to the cashiers' office, and the signed and/or stamped receipt and change were sent back. In between, if wrapping the item didn't take long, there could be an awkward gap to fill.

At Tesco, initially it was used to reduce the cash in tills by sending large notes over the maximum float limit with a slip printed by the till. With people using cards and some taking cashback, I guess that at some more recent time tills may have even started to run short of cash!

I'm sure there are a lot more examples of mechanical forerunners of gadgets that since became electrical, electronic, digital, and now virtual. My favourite remains the mechanical analogue computer.

And cash carriers (aka cash railways) of all kinds, like everything else in this world, have their own web site (http://www.cashrailway.co.uk/index.htm). This includes a few bits of info about the railways' use of such things, e.g. at Euston and Liverpool Street stations, or the Great Western Hotel at Paddington.

I well remember the sound of the containers rushing through the tubes suspended from the corridor ceilings of the office building in which I used to work.  It was said that occasionally a naughty office boy would despatch a cream cake through the tube and not inside the proper container but I never witnessed that myself.

When I worked at Heathrow in the seventies there were several Lamson systems that were used to send documents to different parts of the airport. Some of the systems just connected between two fixed locations, but for others you had to set the address using rotating collars on the carriers e.g. "B1" to go to the teleprinter section. Quite frequently a system would fail, usually when the end cap of a carrier came loose and the papers escaped and got stuck in the mechanism. Mechanics would then be sent out to clear the blockage so the backlog could be cleared.

More recently, the Jacksons department store at Jackson Corner in Reading was still using a Lamson system for payments up to its closure in 2013.

If I recall correctly, as well as Jackson's system recalled by RichT54, another old Reading shop, Reeds, taylors who supplied amongst other things school uniforms until the late 1960s or early 1970s had one of the older mechanical systems too.

Capes Department Store in Oxford (where the Westgate centre is now IIRC) had one in the newer part of the store.  The older part had a sort of cable car system. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67801235

Perhaps the employees laid off can get jobs with Go-Op?  ;)