Wellington-Auckland in under an hour
Telsa founder Elon Musk envisages a network of ‘‘hyperloops’’ that would smoothly whisk people between cities at up to 1200kmh, which is just under the speed of sound.
The incredibly high speeds touted by hyperloop researchers are conceivable because people would travel in pressurised ‘‘pods’’ gliding on magnets, pushed by magnetic pulses through tubes kept at a near-vacuum to reduce air resistance.
One of the huge (some think insurmountable) engineering challenges is creating and maintaining something close to a vacuum in tubes that could stretch hundreds of miles.
Without the near vacuum, hyperloops just become a bit like a Maglev train in a tube.
Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson has signed a ‘‘preliminary agreement’’ to build a hyperloop that would transport people 160 kilometres between the Indian cities of Pune and Mumbai in 25 minutes, implying a less whizzy average speed of about 350kmh.
Its tubes would be depressurised to about 100Pa (pascals), equivalent to the very thin air pressure that exists 60km above the ground.
Branson, who has come off the bench to personally chair his Virgin Hyperloop 1 venture, told the BBC he believed it could transport people ‘‘far quicker, in far greater numbers, with far greater convenience than any other train network in the UK’’.
If ever built in New Zealand, a hyperloop could cut the landtravel time between Auckland and Wellington to under an hour, and between Hamilton and Auckland to less than 10 minutes.
KiwiRail general manager of planning David Gordon says KiwiRail ‘‘has not formally looked at hyperloop technology for New Zealand and has not formed any view on it’’.