Elon Musk: I got ‘verbal’ approval for 29-minute NYC-to-DC hyperloop

Billionaire innovator Elon Musk said he has “verbal” government approval to build an ultra-high-speed underground rail system in the Northeast, offering hope to travelers overwhelmed by mass-transit failures despite skepticism about such an ambitious project.

In a series of tweets that might not be taken seriously if they came from any other corporate executive, Musk flummoxed the transportation industry with claims that he is pursuing a network that would whisk passengers from New York City to Washington, D.C. in 29 minutes.

Transit experts say that gargantuan costs and prodigious bureaucratic hurdles would make such a plan extremely difficult to pull off.

I guess our corporation (The Muhammad Ali Hyperlink) plus our record in the rail industry will sort of qualify us as a “transit expert”. We have designed a “HYPERLOOP” that is very “budget conscious”: follows an Interstate highway from Louisville to Gary, Indiana. Did not know a cost-effective tunneling system; so we will switch passengers to the South Shore Railroadand can be called “Louisville to Chicago” HYPERLOOP.

We, or anybody else, involved in HYPERLOOP cannot accurately forecast costs.

No normal bank or investment company even wants to talk to us (yet). Maybe we need a new Chief Financial Officer?

In the meantime, Elon Musk has bit the mayor of Chicago with another “bug”: a tunnel between the two Chicago airports. Last I knew, Chicago had financial problems: had to borrow $$$ each week to pay teacher’s salaries.

Guess we did things backwards: should have invented a self-driving electric car and started a space exploration company before we took on transit projects.

Maybe Musk could rescue the Second Avenue Subway: bore tunnels for the remainder. After all, the original subway from 1904 used tunnels.

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Super train that would speed between cities at 700mph has its first successful test

The concept of a ‘hyperloop’, a rail system that works in a vacuum tube and thus reaches very high speeds, has been a pipe dream for a while now.

Elon Musk mentioned the concept back in 2012 and liked its immunity to weather, speed and low power consumption.

The speeds of such creations, which some analyses suggest could reach up to 760mph, would reduce a 6 hour journey by car to 35 minutes – even quicker than a flight, which currently takes around 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Now, one of the startups working on this transportation system, just shared footage of their first full-scale test in a vacuum.

The trial run in a track built outside Las Vegas, saw the test vehicle reach 70 mph using magnetic levitation, pulling 2 Gs of acceleration.

A HYPERLOOP ONE affiliate “The Muhammad Ali Hyperlink” has plans to build this new revolutionary transportation system between Louisville and Chicago; It will follow Interstate 55 and stop in Indianapolis!!!

So it is closer than you think! Check it out!

Bunch of DUMMIES Want To Build HYPERLOOP – Forget Tunnel

For over a year a group known collectively as “The Muhammad Ali Hyperlink” has had plans to link Louisville and Chicago with a HYPERLOOP.

Why? To go between Louisville and Chicago now you must drive, fly or take a bus. Louisville is not blessed with an AMTRAK connection.

We know it will be expensive. We will construct in a cost-conscious fashion. We plan to follow the median on Interstate 65 through Indiana then “land” the HYPERLOOP at the Gary International Airport. Passengers would change to the NICDT “South Shore” train to enter Chicago. Excellent Freight railroads can pick up our freight.

The HYPERLOOP is being financed by private funding… and maybe some public too.

Biggest hold up now is the testing of HYPERLOOP…then the funding!

Now look at what is going on in Chicago.

Windy City Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in preliminary talks to have Elon Musk’s latest venture, the Boring Company, tunnel a new high-speed rail line between downtown and O’Hare International Airport. Last we knew such a connection was available in the Chicago Transit Authority.

The LONGEST Interurban Trip!

“The longest continuous trip one could take by interurban was, naturally, in the Northeast and Middle West. Between 1910 and 1922 it was possible to travel by interurban from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin…to Oneonta, New York…a distance of about 1,087 miles. There is no recorded instance of anyone’s taking such a trip, but in 1910…22 businessmen of Utica, New York, chartered car 502 of the New York Central Railroad’s Oneida Railway for a round trip on interurban track to Louisville, Kentucky. Traveling by day and spending nights in hotels, the passengers were royally entertained by interurban executives en route. Although long trips were taken by individual enthusiasts, this was probably the most extensive organized trip ever taken entirely by interurban. *** It was never possible to travel by interurban from Chicago to New York; gaps between Little Falls and Fonda and between Hudson and Tarrytown, both in New York, were never filled.”

Excerpted from _The Electric Interurban Railways in America_, by George W. Hilton and John F. Due, Stanford Univ Press 1960, p. 42: I think this insert was originally written by Robert Gurley of New Hartford, New York (New Hartford is a suburb of Utica; I grew up there so maybe I even know what I’m talking about).

This is a guest post by my boss, Penney

Check out our WebSite on the Southern New York Railway
https://penneyandkc.wordpress.com/the-southern-new-york-railway/

Some New Ideas For Partnering on our HYPERLOOP

First of all, how about partnering with another HYPERLOOP that starts in Pittsburg, goes through Columbus and “lands” in Chicago?

See their presentation on

How the Hyperloop Could Transform the Midwest

After reading about HYPERLOOP, you know that freight is just as important as passenger travel. Well, we have found the perfect partner in Northern Indiana. They can work with us in Louisville and Indianapolis too.

Anacostia Rail Holdings Company owns and operates freight railroads in the United States. Our services provide our customers with neutral access to the larger Class 1 railroads. Our services also include car switching for intermodal terminals and various industries, track maintenance and repair, freight trans-loading, and train dispatching.

Next, how about a Chicago Bypass for freight?

Where East meets West: Any railroad car entering Chicago from any direction can leave in any other direction. It’s done by means of junctions.

World’s greatest junction: Like cruising cabs on city streets, transfer locomotives run from one railroad to another on Chicago’s maze of trackage.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But why do you need it if your shipping something from St Louis to Buffalo or from Milwaukee to Indianapolis.

Hyperloop One has a short list of cities for its 760-mile-per-hour trains

Above: Hyperloop One’s test site in Las Vegas.

Image Credit: Hyperloop One

Hyperloop One is working on a transportation technology that can make trains go as fast as 760 miles per hour. The company has raised $160 million in several rounds to build the transportation systems that seem like something out of science fiction.

Despite a lawsuit from former high-ranking employees, the company has moved swiftly to add new executives and expand its search for sites where it can build its lightning-fast transportation networks in cities around the world. (The company denied the allegations and countersued the former employees.)

Hyperloop One continues to build out its 100,000-square-foot Metalworks fabrication facility and 137-acre Apex test and safety site in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Construction of the company’s full-system development loop is underway as Hyperloop One prepares for its “Kitty Hawk moment” in the first quarter of 2017.

Last week, during CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas, I met with Rob Lloyd, CEO of Hyperloop One. We talked about the company’s global challenge contest to find the world’s best Hyperloop routes. The list is now down to 35 possible projects around the world, and some cities such as Dubai are actively pursuing approvals.

More than 2,600 proposals were registered in five months, and the semifinalists come from 17 countries. A handful of finalists will be named by May. Lloyd and I talked about that process, as well as what Hyperloop transportation will mean for society in the future.

See an interview with Rob Lloyd by DEAN TAKAHASHI@DEANTAK

We are particularly interested in one of HYPEROOP ONE’s 35 FINALISTS: “The Muhammad Ali Hyperlink”

Designed to provide high speed trannsportation between Louisville and Chicago. It fills a void that AMTRAK has not been able to.

Anybody building into Chicago will have a big problem in finding space. As a sensible alternative, We suggested that the new railroad start instead at the Gary/Chicago International Airport. It is already served by the “South Shore” railroad which has a great terminal in downtown Chicago. Gary Airport is receiving Federal funding from Dept. of Transportation and South Shore railroad is receiving State/local funding for expansion.

Very recently Hyperloop One, announced that « cargo will be implemented before passengers ».

We anticipated this with the selection of Gary, Indiana (at the international airport) as our Northern Terminal. Of course passengers will still transfer to the South Shore commuter line operated by the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District. But operating on the same right-of-way is the Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad. It provides freight service between Chicago and South Bend. It has important connections to the Indiana Harbor Railroad, Norfolk Southern, CSX Corporation. It is also connected to the in-formation Great Lakes Basin Transportation. It proposes to construct a new railroad line around the metropolitan Chicago area. The purpose of the new railroad is to expedite freight movements across the nation and to provide additional capacity for growing railroad traffic.

President Trump is “barking up the wrong tree” about High Speed Rail

Just read a great story by MARK WHITTINGTON about Donald Trump’s interest in high speed rail may be made obsolete by the Hyperloop. Passengers and cargo could be moved at supersonic speeds at a fraction of the cost.

President Donald Trump is interested in building high-speed rail lines across the United States. The idea is that 200 miles per hour trains would whisk passengers and cargo between destinations, substantially cutting down travel times. However, an emerging technology called the #hyperloop may already be about to make the high-speed train obsolete.

The Hyperloop would propel people and cargo in pods down a sealed tube using magnetic accelerators at speeds more than 700 miles an hour. The technology was invented by SpaceX’s Elon Musk and is now being refined by a number of private companies. Musk claims that a Hyperloop line between Los Angeles and San Francisco would cost about $6 billion to build as opposed to the nearly $70 billion (and growing) that the proposed high-speed rail line is estimated to cost. The line would be solar powered and, since it is built on elevated pylons, would have less of a “footprint” than a rail line. Hyperloop lines could be built along Interstate highways.

The Trump administration should approach the siren call of building railroads with caution. To be sure existing rail lines and tunnels, some of them approaching a century old, need upgrading. But if a way can be found to move people and cargo between cities at greater speeds, as less cost, powered by renewable energy, using less land, then that way should be seriously considered. Great care, at any rate, should be taken when spending hundreds of billions of dollars. Perhaps a prototype project, connecting two cities somewhere in the United States, should be undertaken to test the usefulness of the Hyperloop before committing to high-speed rail.

Perhaps President Trump should start with a “smallish” project: connect Louisville and Chicago. AMTRAK has fallen on it’s face over the years on this one. Well, they have an airport and an Interstate Highway.

Our company has already proposed this project to HYPERLOOP ONE, the leading company in the Hyperloop field. We have already published details of this project.

We have tried to make it as simple as possible and bring costs down. We follow Interstate Highway 65 from Louisville to Gary, Indiana. Then, knowing the extreme difficulty of entering Chicago from the East, we took a novel change. Passengers and freight stop at the Gary International Airport and change to the South Shore Railroad (already rebuilt with government funds). Passengers get off at Millennium Station in downtown Chicago.

The Hyperloop Could Make Even More Massive Megacities

The Hyperloop, is the latest and greatest in ground transportation. Made sort of famous by Elon Musk, it uses vacuum tubes to move containers that hold people and cargo. The United States is sort of behind the rest of the World, so let’s first of all talk of Australia.

The Hyperloop zips around in a tube at 1000+ km/h (620+ mph). These high speeds have the possibility to shorten travel times, making it easier to get from city to city.

Despite skepticism, Hyperloop One hopes to connect Sydney and Melbourne in Australia. Passengers can travel between the two in under an hour.

Now, officials from Hyperloop One are proposing that the Hyperloop could eventually merge the cities of Sydney and Melbourne, creating one huge megacity. The best part? Travel time is around an hour.

“We’ll make Sydney and Melbourne really connected to each other. If you connect two cities with Hyperloop, you get, effectively, a sort of global city punching above its weight in a global economy,”says Hyperloop One VP Alan James.

For those unfamiliar with the technology, Hyperloop is essentially a passenger/cargo carrying capsule that zips around in a tube at 1000+ km/h (620+ mph). Those speeds promise to change the very urban landscape.

But the system does face a lot of skepticism. A real Hyperloop test hasn’t really been done, so we can’t see the effects on humans or cargo that travel on it. Also, there are no estimates on the massive infrastructure costs that could be associated with building Hyperloop tracks.

If it were to work out, though, a ticket from Sydney to melbourne would be booked via an app and cost less than a full-priced, last minute plane ticket.

Now a lot of projects on the drawing boards in U.S. Only today will mention the two that our company is involved in. The bigger one is linking Chicago and Louisville. The smaller one is on an unused railroad in Metropolitan New York City. It will link Beacon Station on the Metro-North Railroad Hudson Division with Southeast Station on the Metro-North Railroad Harlem Division. More and more people live in the area between the two stations and if they work in New York City must choose which station they will drive to. Next week we will be attending a site visit conducted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority!

Big Changes Ahead For The Muhammad Ali Hyperlink

Yes, our vision remains the same : provide fast and reliable transportation between Chicago and Louisville. However there are two important changes to our environment: (1) Cincinnati, Ohio has a Hyperloop project now; and (2) Hyperloop now feels that cargo has more priority than passengers.
Hyperloop One raised $50 million and hired former Uber CFO Brent Callinicos. The new round, led by DP World Groups in Dubai, brings the company’s total funding to $160 million.
Hyperloop UC, the University of Cincinnati’s interdisciplinary team, will unveil their entry for the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition on Monday, Oct. 17. The pod will be used during the next phase of the international Hyperloop competition to be held at a test track next to SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, in January 2017.
After months of preparation, a team of University of Cincinnati students will pull the curtain back on their Hyperloop pod, a prototype they think could reshape high-speed transportation as part of the competition dreamed up by Tesla founder Elon Musk. As CEO of the aerospace firm SpaceX, Musk has challenged the world to submit ideas — and now prototypes — for a tube-based passenger system that would allow for travel between cities at the speed of sound.
More than 60 students from Hyperloop UC — engineers, designers and marketers — have been busy finalizing designs, manufacturing parts and synthesizing segments into a seamless prototype for the January 27-29 competition when they will insert their pod for takeoff in a mile-long test track.
UC’s group is one of just 30 that has advanced to the test round of the Hyperloop competition out of more than 1,200 teams worldwide. If successful, the venture could completely shift the way commuters travel. Cincinnati to Chicago, for example, could be travelled in a half hour — all while passengers relax in a capsule that levitates through the tube at more than 700 mph.
“We are very proud of the design we have created,” says Dhaval Shiyani, Hyperloop UC President and aerospace engineering graduate student in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS). “It hits all the marks with respect to performance, safety and scalability. Our education at UC has taught us well, and we are confident that we will be a force to reckon with come January.”
UC’s team was among 120 teams invited to Texas A&M University in January of 2016 to present their ideas, where they were then selected to be among just 30 who are moving on to the final round of competition. UC is also the only group representing Ohio universities.

Very recently Hyperloop One, (the Elon Musk organization), announced that « cargo will be implemented before passengers ».

We anticipated this with the selection of Gary, Indiana (at the international airport) as our Northern Terminal. Of course passengers will still transfer to the South Shore commuter line operated by the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District. But operating on the same right-of-way is the Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad. It provides freight service between Chicago and South Bend.It has important connections to the Indiana Harbor Railroad, Norfolk Southern, CSX Corporation. It is also connected to the in-formation Great Lakes Basin Transportation. It proposes to construct a new railroad line around the metropolitan Chicago area. The purpose of the new railroad is to expedite freight movements across the nation and to provide additional capacity for growing railroad traffic.

Train traffic, speed to increase on LIRC line in Kentucky, Indiana

Train traffic will increase on the Louisville and Indiana Railroad (LIRC) between Louisville, Ky., and Seymour, Ind., on or after Sept. 1, according to the short line’s parent company Anacostia Rail Holdings.

Over several weeks, CSX and LIRC train speeds will increase incrementally from the current speed limit of 25 mph to a maximum of 49 mph at many locations, Anacostia officials said in a press release.

Track and signal improvements have been made to allow for a safe increase in speed. The number and average length of CSX trains also will increase from four trains to 10 trains daily on the LIRC line.

The number and length of CSX trains will vary and continue to adjust depending on freight volume.