Operators hope newly opened Dutch track will help prove feasibility of high-speed shuttle system
Source: The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... sport-hype Accessed: 2024-03-30
Source: The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... sport-hype Accessed: 2024-03-30The longest hyperloop test track in Europe has opened, raising faint hopes once more that the maglev meets vacuum tube transport technology could be the future.
Operators said the facility would help prove the hyperloop’s feasibility, saying it could allow a 6,200-mile (10,000km) network of high-speed tubes to be in place around the continent by 2050.
As it stands, the European Hyperloop Center test bed in Veendam is not so much a loop as a 420-metre-long forked white pipe running alongside the railway and road that must still be used, for now, to transport people around this corner of the Netherlands.
Made of 34 interconnected prefabricated 2.5-metre-wide steel cylinders, the partly EU-funded test pipe is somewhat shorter than the 2-mile track envisaged in 2020, and allows speeds of only a fraction of the 620mph (1000km/h) that proponents believe the technology can achieve.
The fork in the Vandeem pipe will allow engineers to test what happens at a “lane switch” when a high-speed vehicle changes course. First tests will be carried out by the Dutch company Hardt Hyperloop in the coming weeks.
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While past predictions for the hyperloop have appeared unduly bold, Lamme maintained a pan-European network could appear in a few decades. “If you look at how highways were developed over time, it goes exponentially when the technology is ready. It should really be possible to get into a station in Amsterdam and travel to a city like Barcelona in two hours.”
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Europe’s innovation may yet allow it to keep up with developments in China, which opened a one-mile test track for “low-vacuum pipeline magnetic levitation technology” in Shanxi province in 2022, according to state media.
