Episode 150: The Death of Hyperloop

I think Liam, you're a little bit quiet, at least to me.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, let me eat the mic a little bit here.

Oh, fuck.

There you go.

Ah, well, we killed Liam.

Not supposed to actually eat it.

Oh, oh, it's so tasty.

Oh, man.

Can we do a whole one where Liam?

Liam, you're already a sexy MF.

Can you do one like that, please?

You make me pointy for two hours.

You make me pointy.

You like that?

I like it a lot.

Yeah, I stole pointy.

It's actually one of my greatest shames.

I stole the pointy joke from a friend of mine named David Powers.

Shout out to David Powers.

Yeah, an uncredited contributor.

Yeah, I steal a lot of phrases.

There's some real gross ones I have, like a euphemism for sex being touching tutors.

I've heard that enough.

I have phrases, but all of mine are just things like things of this nature.

Yeah,

I think I invented have a nice time.

I I did.

International Best Friends Day?

International Friends Day, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

I try and do my very best to use suck the shit out of my ass, which is a limbism.

I enjoy that so much.

And it sounds so strange.

I have to say it in a very strong Scottish accent for it to be convincing.

Yeah, I bet.

That's magnificent.

All right, you want to do this?

Let's do a podcast.

Let's podcast.

Let's pod.

Hello, and welcome to Will Air's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

All right, go.

I am the assemblage of COVID modules currently piloting the body of Alice Caldwell-Kelly.

I guess that makes my pronouns they and them.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam Anderson.

I'm the person talking right now.

I was joking.

Don't actually fucking they, them, me.

No, don't.

Uh, unless you're mad at her.

Yeah, boy, unless you're mad at me, yeah.

Yeah, it's disgusting.

But yeah, we have a guest.

We have a guest.

Oh, he was just about to take a sip of water, too.

Returning champion.

Doing a great job of introducing myself onto this podcast.

What a lovely time.

I've come back to spend some time with my dear friends in the WTYP team.

Yeah, it's Gareth Dennis.

Hi.

Hi.

I'm here.

What are your pronouns?

Oh, yeah.

My pronouns are he, him.

Thanks, Liam.

I suck.

My pronouns are he, him.

We trip everybody up with the pronouns, including, I guess, myself just now.

Yeah, we're all confused.

Because of the woke.

It's because there's also some genuine time pressure, which as a podcast, we're not very good at

as collective podcasters, as someone who has a long-form podcast, I'm not very good at it.

And I think the hogs know that you're not very good at it as well.

Umzabeto.

So I don't come on to Real Nasher and criticize your time management skills.

Oh, our time management skills are in the toilet, Alice.

They always have been.

Alice, you came on and did an episode on time management.

So usually.

Do you remember when we recorded

Bhopal and then University back-to-back?

Do you remember a mere moment ago where we said we had a time pressure and then we each launched a tangent independently?

It's okay.

I got

like two and a half hours.

I can make it work.

We have 63 slides, Liam.

I fucking hate this game.

Literally unplayable.

What you see on the screen in front of you is a massive impediment to shipping.

I've always wanted to impede that as a longtime member of the Houthi Rebels.

I was about to say,

this is not Houthis, but it does start with H.

It's a hyperloop.

Yes.

Oh, H is for Hyperloop in Elon Musk's turd alphabet.

Also known as Swiss Metro.

We'll get there.

Yeah.

Owing to the recent demise of Hyperloop One, we think it's finally to come out and talk about the Hyperloop on a podcast.

Now, ideally, we would have done an episode on Hyperloop earlier so we could all say, we told you so, but we didn't do that.

But rest assured, we've all been thinking it for at least a decade now.

I think we've had it in news segments before.

If anyone wants to do it,

you had a Hyperloop.

Did you have a Hyperloop video on Do Not Eat?

No, that was a regular loop.

Yeah, that was a regular loop.

Just plain loop.

We've done it on on TF a bunch of times.

So definitely, like, in the sort of broader universe, we're very, very, like, anti-hyperloop.

Yep.

Yeah, I could, I could, I, I, I, I tweeted about it angrily in 2017.

So that's my, that's my, like, checkpoint on when I was mad about it.

From Alice Avazandam.

Hyperloop.

Uh.

Elon Musk finally builds the Hyperloop traveling so fast beneath California every passenger arrives dead exactly according to plan.

Uh 13th of February 2017.

Nice, nice.

I would say I first got mad at it the first time I saw the white paper.

2013.

Roz was a Hyperloop hating hipster before it was cool.

I started hating early.

You were born a hater.

And my hate has only grown more pure.

I'm proud of you.

There's one here that says, I just wanted to make a joke about Peter Thiel before he steals all my blood to power the Hyperloop.

I forget how good at tweeting you are.

I thought the new the new hyper loop that they're proposing in Canada runs on plasma, not blood.

Yeah.

But before we talk about the late hyperloop, we have to do the goddamn news.

Folks, it's real.

It's real and it's weak and it's our enemy.

Yeah, the thing you'll get outclassed by a Subaru outback.

It has come to light that the new all-stainless steel Cybertruck needs to be frequently cleaned from any kind of corrosive substance or it may damage the exterior through corrosion.

From Alice Avazandam's cybertruck.

Actually, nothing.

I haven't gotten any good cyberpunk tweets, which is weird given that it's

the slowest moving, largest, most polygonal target.

Yes.

It's like an

F-117, and you're a Serbian baker.

Yeah.

I've always identified very deeply with like Serbian service to MSL crews.

Yeah.

First the Houthis, now them.

So.

According to the user's manual of the Cybertruck, to prevent damage to the exterior, immediately remove corrosive substances such as greased, oil, bird droppings, tree resin, dead insects, tar spots, road salt, industrial fallout, etc.

Do not wait until Cybertruck is due for a complete wash.

If necessary, use the nadex, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I hate

this heck manual convention of referring to it by name, no pronoun,

as like do not charge iPhone unless thing.

Do not charge, do not wash Cybertruck unless whatever.

But yeah, we've all seen the videos of this thing, like in the flesh, with all of the panels out of alignment, getting its wheels stuck spinning and like a sort of five-degree slope.

What was the coach that was in the crash in the first episode we did together that had like not stainless steel, but it like

rusted?

The Osgoode Bradley coaches.

Is this the Osgoode Bradley coach of

the Road World?

Here's the thing.

A lot of people have been commenting that the reason this is happening is because it doesn't have a clear coat.

But I believe this particular grade of stainless steel will corrode if you clear coat it just from the clear coat.

Oh my God.

So that's also not an option.

These things don't react well to sort of built-in suspenders approach to corrosion prevention.

Some things.

Don't react well to clear coats.

I was trying to do Sean Connery there, but I have too much of a cold.

Yeah.

So the other thing that strikes me is that, like, they've got the experience of owning a 1970s Italian sports car where it rains once and you wake up and the suspension is a pile of rust lying under the car, but without being fun to drive, and it's the whole body of the car.

Long live glorious Alpha Robail.

so a lot of stuff really confuses me about this because stainless steel is you know a very resilient material i mean that's what they build all the the train cars out of here in the united states because it works really good and here it's just falling apart instantly now i know that tesla developed their own special kind of stainless steel they call 30x well there's your there's your problem yeah

Elon Musk has been involved in the design process.

I have no idea how or what they did to it.

I mean, presumably, what they've done to prevent, so there's something stainless likes to do called oil canning, right?

Where it warps a little bit when it's pressed flat, which doesn't look very good.

And I guess what they've done to prevent that is sacrifice all the natural corrosion-resistant properties of stainless steel.

Metallurgy, you know, it's a series of trade-offs, and somehow they've made every single one of those wrong.

Well, the thing is,

I believe it is an 18 and 8 stainless steel, you know, 18% chromium, 8% nickel.

Maybe it's the other way around, I forget, which is usually pretty resilient, but I don't know how they fucked it up this badly.

I mean, fucking title his biography that, to be honest.

Yeah.

I found out something about Elon Musk, by the way.

You know, he tried on for a while, and I'm not making fun of anyone for trying on new names because, yeah, but you know, he tried pronouncing his name Elon for for a bit.

This video of him

introducing himself as Elon Musk at a conference, and no one, no one buys it.

You know, he had to go back to Elon by sort of popular demand, which

sad.

Well, you know how he tried,

which is more than more than can be said about what he did with the Hyperloop.

You know, but yeah, I mean, so these, these, these cyber trucks are all pavement princesses.

It's, it's, it's really incredible what Southern California brain does to you in car design.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing.

Like, you can buy the sort of child-killing Ford pickup with the sort of massive flat front, and it will at least like drive off-road.

Yeah.

Like, as I understand it, they're quite good at that.

Okay, the, you know, the, the truck bed is still the same size as an old Toyota Tacoma, but, like,

you can still put stuff in it.

And the panels meet.

So, you know, you could just buy one of those.

Or you could buy this and sort of have everyone realize that you're a dip shit because the car melts holes in it, the rain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you're going to drive this onto like the grass parking lot at the Maryland Renaissance Fair.

And by the time you're back, your car will be in pieces like the Blues Brothers car.

Maryland Renaissance Fair, an acute observation of where I'm likely to see one of these parked, I think.

2024, and Elon Musk has invented old British automotive output from the 1970s.

Yeah, all I need to know is that the Cybertruck is more aerodynamic in reverse, which to be honest, it looks like it might be.

Yeah.

In other news.

Whoa.

Whoa.

Boeing is fucking up because of DEI initiatives causing parts to fall off planes.

Yeah, this is.

We've gone far enough with creating shareholder value.

Just nationalize Boeing.

do the unspeakable to all the executives, so on and so forth, shovel their corpses out into the

Puget Sound or whatever.

To be clear, we don't actually believe that this is the fault of Woke, right?

What's happening is Boeing is fucking up and there has been this like confluence of minor accidents and sort of incidents and stuff.

And one big not so minor incident of the fucking door coming off one of the planes.

But all of the worst chuds in the world are trying to push the idea that the reason this is happening is because Boeing is doing DEI, diversity, equality, and inclusion, like corporate woke.

And because of that, and they're, you know, it's abstracted on a number of levels how far away they want to obscure their sort of conspiracist idea that the airlines are hiring black people for the first time in history, apparently, and that's making the wings fall off the plane.

But that's basically what they're saying.

It is nonsense.

And anyone who tells you it is trying to sell you on becoming a Nazi.

But

it is true that the wings are falling off the planes.

It's just not because of what.

What's funny is that

all this Boeing stuff is happening at the same time that that Airbus

had fire rage through it and everyone got off it safely.

So Airbus is kind of rubbing its hands together at this point as Boeing seems to be taking a shit on itself.

European excellence burger plane washed.

The two recent incidents here are

at the at Atlanta,

a Delta 757 had a nose wheel fall off when it was taking off.

Yeah.

And that's not especially good.

Saves weight, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then I forget what the other one was, but there was

a Virgin Atlantic plane that was going to fly transatlantic.

And as it was on the runway, passenger looks out the window, sees that there's a bunch of bolts missing in one of the wing

things, and tells the stewardess, who is like, Okay, well,

we cannot fly the plane now, I guess, because it's got like 50 bolts missing.

Because of woke is why.

Wait, wasn't there another?

What was the door?

Also, a door fell, like, blew up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We did this.

We did this last episode of the Alaska plane that the door blew off.

Basically, what this amounts to is Boeing is doing stuff on the cheap, and also airlines are not as good at maintenance as they should be.

I was about to say, you know, zero fatalities in however many years now, but that's not for lack of trying.

No, no, no, no, no.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing.

Everyone who

you talk to who works with,

you know, passenger aviation sort of understands that the unblemished safety record is by virtue of like a lot of really good engineering applied in some of the dumbest ways possible.

And yeah, I mean, some of it does just run down to dumb luck as well.

I'm counting on these numbers getting worse because certainly in Europe,

aviation and railways are on level pegging in terms of passenger safety.

So

we need a few biggies.

We need Boeing to keep us from the dirty.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So

they're pretty much exactly level peggy in terms of fatalities per billion kilometers or whatever.

So

come on, Boeing.

Give me a solid.

You got it.

Just for clarity, I'm not calling for a plane crash.

Legally, you cannot.

You heard it here, folks.

Gareth wants two 747s to wreck into each other again.

I mean, if you're flying a 747 at this point, you kind of deserve what you get.

Yeah, so I mean,

there's been like some of the operators are putting a little like, is this flown by a Boeing checkfield on flights you can search for in case you want to like veto it.

Wow.

In case you only want to fly Airbus, the correct passenger.

Actually, no, I'm not going to take a stance that hard on behalf of Airbus.

The true proletarian

passenger air vehicle is an Embraer because

of Lula and the Lulags, you know?

Yes.

Do not ask anything about what the Embraer family does.

Maybe an Aleutian or something, you know?

Short.

Everyone should be flying short.

Yeah, flying boats.

Yeah, that's it.

Maybe a nice de Havilland otter.

Yeah, that's it.

Why did I just assume that there was an embraer family?

Why did I assume that there was like a name?

Surely, there's a dynasty.

There's got to be an embryo dynasty.

That sounds

like a dynastic name.

Sure, I'm going to butcher this, but it's Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica.

It's the Brazilian Aeronautics Corporation.

Oh, wow.

It was nationalized originally, which again, Lula, do it again, you know.

Yeah, well, that was the goddamn news

sorry this thing makes me laugh whenever i see it yeah um i will not live in the pods

i will not i was trying to i i was trying to do something with this image where they the transport tycoon bankruptcy message would pop up down here

but the thing is i left the game running for an hour with a deficit that never came up

so i couldn't take a screenshot yeah i mean anyway bankruptcy and transport isn't real real, is the lesson that Transport Fever teaches you.

The worst part was after that hour, the company started making money.

I'm very bad at losing money in that game.

This is the thing about transport, you know, it's teaching you a realistic lesson, which is it doesn't matter how big a loss you post.

So MTA, stop paying your bills.

Yeah, stop paying your bills.

Stop charging fares.

Everybody be like Albuquerque.

The biggest Hyperloop company, Hyperloop One, has gone bankrupt and had its assets sold off to creditors.

Oh, no.

What does this mean?

We could have gotten some Hyperloop shit.

Like, when they had the Twitter auction, people bought the Twitter swag too quickly for us to get a big wooden bird thing out of their office.

But we could have gotten some Hyperloop shit, some pens or something.

I put the whole pod in my backyard.

I want to see this pod up on cinderblocks in front of a Philly row house.

Oh, that'd be really funny.

So I thought, you know, the best way to get us to where we are with the Hyperloop being not completely dead, but mostly dead, is first we have to do history.

We have to

first we have to do and then a pause.

It primes me.

Yeah.

It clicker trained me to hit the news drop.

We want to ask, what is a Hyperloop?

A fraud.

It's like a loop, but more so.

Hyper.

It's just my cliff.

Yeah.

Well, sort of.

First, we have to talk about using air to move trains.

Oh, it's come full circle now.

Yes.

Yeah.

We're finally, we've run out of ideas.

We're back to the clip show format, you know?

Yeah.

Everybody's like, sit back, tune out for an hour or so.

Remember these are favorite songs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They'll never stop.

Well, there's your problem podcast.

That's because we got them.

We'll be doing this.

We'll be doing this into our ACs.

Until the wheels come off.

Okay.

I'm just going to talk briefly about atmospheric railways.

Since there's been trains, there's been proposals to power them by means other than steam, one of which is messing with air pressure.

Yeah, the big suck.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

The big suck or the big blow.

Yeah.

Sorry.

You know,

the first attempt in 1834, the Dalky Atmospheric Railway, that's a piston in a tube.

1835, the Paris Saint-Germain Railway.

That's another piston in a tube.

You have a tube, differential air pressure.

There's a piston in it.

There's a slot at the top.

Train goes.

Right.

Yeah.

Listen to the fucking atmospheric railway episode.

You can learn a lot about Rat Viscera.

Yeah.

And terrified Irishman.

Yes, exactly.

There are several people who have done animations of that specific episode because it's one of our best.

This

remaining optimistic.

I think we can hit higher heights.

Yes.

So

another,

so this was done either because they needed to climb slopes, they needed more speed, so on and so forth.

But they didn't work that well and steam technology is sort of.

advanced beyond that, right?

Yeah.

And so it's worth very briefly saying,

there wasn't so much craziness.

The idea was taking the power source out of the train, which is what we've done with electric trains, right?

With overhead electrication.

So the logic here was sort of sound because they didn't have good electricity at this point.

But yeah, it ended up with rat viscera and it wasn't very good.

Yes.

Another example is Alfred Eli Beach's Beach Pneumatic Transit System in New York City.

This was in 1870.

It was a new idea.

Cute bug one on the right.

Instead of having a piston in a tube, the whole train is the piston.

Right.

You ran a test track that went 300 feet from Broadway and Warren Street to just past Broadway and Warren Street in Manhattan.

That thin wooden door is the plank between you and eternity.

Yeah.

It was intended to go five more miles to Central Park.

It would be faster than a streetcar and cleaner than one of the steam-elevated trains.

But the project was killed by the panic of 1873 because of how the gold standard works, which is to say it doesn't.

But yeah, these systems all try to solve various problems like steep grades, low speeds, uncleanliness, so on and so forth, with the power of air.

None of them stood the test of time because steam technology improved and then electricity took over as Garrett's.

Yeah, and we have now a solved technology in the form of overhead line electrification that goes to a nuclear power plant that just doesn't.

No, we've got to put batteries on it.

Battery trades are the future.

What about

wires?

In the same way that firearms are a solved technology, trains are a solved technology.

It's fine.

Yes, we've solved it, folks.

It's done.

Just build it.

Until you invent some kind of frictionless material or maglev, unless you make maglev like really practical or whatever, maybe.

It's fine.

A lot of people out there who hear things like 120-year-old technology and they think it just means that it's that old, as opposed to there's a hundred and twenty years of development.

How many wars did the cult 45 win?

You know, maybe I should try and sell it this way in a slightly more masculine sense and say that the overhead line electrification is the cult 1911 of trains.

There's a hundred and twenty years of development on that.

125 years of perfection.

You can't get that from a new technology.

So incidentally, the plug pneumatic tube train is an affront to God.

It goes against everything in my principles as a railway engineer.

Designing the train to essentially contact everything around it makes me unhappy.

It sounds like there'd be a lot of friction.

Yeah.

Lube up that train.

If I like the late 1800s, early 1900s, it seems like railroads have topped out at about 100 miles an hour, which is faster than anyone could conceivably need to go anyway.

I kind of simply believe this.

If it for yourself, goddammit.

I'm not like a big speed person.

If my journey takes more than you know, it takes a long time at 100 miles an hour constantly, then fine.

It takes a long time.

It's a long distance.

Some people dare to dream bigger.

There was this article in Scientific American in 1909 by none other than rocketry pioneer Robert H.

Goddard called The Limit of Rapid Transit.

And so Goddard proposes a new use for air pressure.

Instead of having it push the train, the train is propelled by by other means inside an evacuated tube a vacuum tube this sounds familiar yeah can't have air resistance if you don't have air but elon musk invented it and elon musk wasn't born in the 1950s that we know of that we know of yeah

so these vacuum tube trains uh this is an idea he plays with throughout his entire life he he only gets posthumously awarded a patent in 1950 despite coming up with it 40 years earlier the idea you know it's simple.

There's no air resistance in this evacuated tube.

The train can go any arbitrary speed, limited only by the right-of-way geometry and bearings if, you know, the thing uses wheels, which a lot of early proposals did.

Some foreshadow in there, listeners.

Limited by geometry.

Geometry.

The geometry being dictated by geography, which is...

exists, unfortunately.

There's soils and loams and mountains and stuff

in the way between where you want to go.

The guys from alt.pave the earth haven't won yet.

We haven't played a kind of like perfect Indianapolis parking lot landscape.

Perfect asphalt sphere.

No, I still think that we need a hard cap of 100 miles an hour in all forms of transit.

If I can't get there in an Antonov AN2, then why do I need to be flying?

Is it an Antonov?

I ain't going.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Fuck Embraer.

You You know, this is the real shit.

I'm flying the crop duster.

Yeah.

It can't stall.

It has no stall speed.

Sorry.

You know, there's incredible speeds here possible, you know, a thousand miles an hour, 2,000 miles an hour, 10,000 miles an hour.

Sort of depends on the route, how much you can accelerate.

Maybe, maybe you're doing Los Angeles to New York City in under an hour.

Maybe you're doing like New York to Paris in 40 minutes.

It's this exciting concept, but it's hard to implement practically given limitations in vacuum pump technology,

the perfect seal, the whole length of the tube.

Availability of steel.

Yes.

No one's built one for reasons.

So

we have a pipe dream.

Did a little shadow boxing thing there.

Yeah.

We have two technologies that take over for high-speed transportation, one of which is air travel.

Boo.

This isn't an Antonoff AN2.

Very, to be fair, it's pretty fetching.

I love it when their jet engines are tiny.

Yeah, this is a Boeing 707.

This is back when, when, when, when parts didn't fall, well, they did still fall off, but it was acceptable back then.

Yeah, this was significantly deadlier to fly on.

Like, just to retain some sense of perspective, this is way more dangerous.

Yeah.

Looks cooler, though, so it's impossible to say if it was good or not, you know?

Yeah, the Comet Defeater we've got on screen here to spin back to your previous episode on the Comet.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

Let's go look at air traffic.

Air travel gets cheaper.

It gets more tolerable.

The planes go faster.

They don't have to refuel as much.

So these really, really fast vacuum tube trains, that's more of a niche idea now because 500 miles an hour is fine.

Right.

And then the other thing is, of course.

While researchers in the United States are figuring out the next generation of incredibly high-speed trains, the rest of the world actually builds high-speed trains.

This is the real shit, my beautiful, beloved TGVs.

Yeah.

For the benefit of listeners, I just

in an entirely audio-only format, just air-pumped and whittled my fingers around silently, for everyone's benefit when the picture of the trains appeared.

Yes.

You show me these early TGVs, I become a gallist.

It's embarrassing.

I become like a weeb for France, a weeb, but it's O-U-I-B.

I'm like, some of the footage they took took of those just, oh, crazy.

Yeah.

So it's worth, it's very briefly worth interjecting

that what's fun about this, this is their circles back to your APT episode.

We're circling back to lots of episodes.

I'm feeling melancholic.

I've not seen all of you and chat to you for ages.

So I'm just thinking, I'm just reminiscing on past times.

Yeah, so APT, the development of the APT involved fixing the problem that Maglev was intended to solve.

We'll talk about that in a minute, I'm sure.

Which was to deal with once trains reach a certain speed, they did this thing where the wheels that hunt, they do this thing called hunting.

They do that anyway.

All trains do that.

But at certain speeds

with kind of the technology of the time in the middle of the last century, they'd kind of do that to the point where it would be, they'd vibrate vigorously and use a lot of energy to go faster.

It's that

BBC report where the guy's on the APT and he's saying over the kind of like audible rattle of everything around him, it's smooth, quiet, and an altogether delightful experience.

But it was, well, that's because he was drunk.

They solved it for me.

So a chap called Alan Wickens, Professor Alan Wickens is the guy who came up with, who kind of headed the APT project.

APT was a failure, but he developed a thing called Yaw Dampers or kind of modern yaw dampers, which solved the hunting problem for high speeds.

And it was that work that enabled everything after the Shinkan Sen.

So the first Shinkan Sen didn't employ it, and that's kind of why they were limited to 125, 130 miles an hour.

But everything after that used Wickens's yaw dampers.

So APT might not have worked, worked, but the work of the APT researchers gave the rest of the world conventional steel-on-steel high-speed rail.

So the TGV used, the French TGV used the yaw dampers developed by the weird white coat Boffins

in Derby.

Weird sort of surge of British patriotism to know that something named as Britishly as Wicens' yaw dampers is

right.

No,

it's always interesting.

You look back at like all this advanced rail technology, like half of it comes from British Rail because they had a well-wild,

well-funded engine

research department.

Yeah,

our research division.

They got money.

They had time to invent UFOs.

And as a result of the time inventing UFOs, seriously, look out the patents, folks.

In the time, in time to do that, they also invented a load of really useful shit that we are still using now to this day across the whole global railway.

It's quite marvelous.

Bring back British Rail.

Yeah, bring back British Rail and their own, you know, their skunk works, their Area 51 or whatever they had

in Derby.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the rest of the world is building high-speed rail.

You got the Takedo Shinkansen.

That's 1964, regular service at 130 miles an hour between Tokyo and Osaka.

The Italians are building the Doratissima, right?

That's from beautiful trains.

Very beautiful.

It goes from Rome to Florence.

This is a more modern high-speed train here, but the Doratissima was one of the very first high-speed rails in europe right um that's 1977 i think the polish possibly got there first in the official definitions of high-speed rail as well so shout out to the polish out there roz you're in i hold on i didn't know that where where is that that google it i can't because i'm dumb as shit i can't remember the exact name of the line but um when i did my first high-speed rail in europe episode about um the telby diversion um apparently i was like the french and the italians got there first but actually no apparently the polish got there as well so um shout out shout out to the Poles and your high-speed rail.

I'm always shouting out the Poles.

A lot of these early ones in Europe, a lot of the early ones are really modernization of

existing routes.

They weren't dedicated high speed until you get to the LGV Sud Est in

France that goes from

Paris to Lyon.

That's 1983, right?

Trains are getting faster, much, much faster.

They're getting competitive with the airlines.

God, they look good.

I have to agree with Alice.

These are some of the best best-looking trains ever.

The original TGV are, oh my God.

I mean, they set the speed record for a train with a specially lightened one of these.

Like, yeah, yeah.

What is it?

Like 470.

Well, I have to remind myself, 474 kilometers an hour.

Or is it maybe more than absolutely ludicrous speeds?

Okay, not the point.

The slightly newer ones, as Alice says, but like so fast.

And it's on French, beautiful French technology.

I have a particular favorite, by the way, which is the Tejeve Laposte, because I love a fast postal train, but

I love a too fast postal train.

And it doesn't exist anymore because there's no niche for it.

Because for some reason, in a time where everyone's ordering shit from Amazon constantly, we can't imagine needing to ship stuff really quickly.

But yeah, no, it's just like we'll get to that later.

Holy shit, not 474 kilometers an hour, 574 kilometers an hour.

360 miles, 360 miles an hour that the Steel on Steel LJV S, LJV ST has managed with

a kind of a slightly modded souped up TGV.

Yeah, they've been in sort of an like a unofficial competition with the the Japanese superconducting maglev.

Yeah, and do you know what's funny is that the um do you know how fast the Yamanashi test track, the maglev, which again, we'll get there, folks.

Sorry, the l naught series has reached 375 miles an hour and the steel on steel has reached 360 miles an hour 15 miles an hour slower conventional steel on steel so fuck you maglev yeah

so yeah trains are getting faster um in europe in asia Not so much in the United States, which is, you know, we have national prestige on the line, right?

All these other, you know, these other smaller and poorer countries are developing HSR.

The USA needs to one-up everyone, and this is where the very high-speed transportation system comes in.

Yeah, that very real sort of like finger in the eye there.

Yeah,

so there's this guy, Robert M.

Salter.

He works at the RAND Corporation, that's the research and development corporation, right?

Yeah, I never respected them as much after I found out that the A and the N are just and.

Yeah,

he comes up with a comprehensive proposal for a vac train system in America in 1972.

And this is a simple matter of thousands of miles of deep track tunneling across the country with stations at higher elevations.

So gravity assists braking and acceleration.

Trains would initially travel at several hundreds of miles an hour on steel wheels.

But when maglev technology matured, they could be upgraded to much higher speeds, right?

How can gravity slow a train down that's that's doing it at rabbit ears very high speed like need a lot of gravity

these stations i presume these stations were 150 meters in the air like on sort of like an eiffel tower type arrangement well here's the other thing you do is that air pressure from the stations could be used to accelerate and decelerate trains so essentially as they're going up the slope into the station you open the airlocks and the air rushes out and that helps slow it down too right my god imagine like standing by one of these platforms.

Well,

the station just farts all your clothes off.

It's a little, a little

and then just all the doors open.

It's just stripped nude by this rush man.

You know, but this is supposed to be good enough.

The train might need and not need an onboard motor.

And this was in Salter's words,

the next logical step for transportation.

Oh, wasn't it?

Yeah.

And so

this nationwide system is

barely on the edge of technical feasibility, but also ludicrously expensive.

I love that.

Yeah.

I do get to say that it'll make journey times that are just, they can make up the journey times, though, because it's so ludicrous.

They could just make it up.

I'm sure we'll learn a lesson to not pay attention to that sort of hocum.

Oh, this idea was taken seriously.

It wasn't really pursued beyond some very high-level technical documents, but it did provide enough breathing room that it could reasonably be claimed that

rail is for once and all obsolete for passenger transportation.

We should move on to newer technologies.

Now, what in fact happened during that same era is we get the high-speed ground transportation act, and America invests in this.

Yes,

the metro liner.

Oh, my God.

I love it so much.

Like the sum total of the 20th century is we get the Metro liner and some track upgrades, the Northeast Corridor, and everything sort of decays.

I love it so much.

It's just like fuck you air.

Aerodynamics.

It runs into it with a blunt end.

They did manage 160 miles an hour in these once.

Absolutely incredible.

Is this the one that blew out windows adjacent to it?

Yes.

One of the first test runs that blew out the windows on a commuter train next to it.

That's why they tested night now.

Make the train pointy, knowing that way.

Oh, yes.

So

we don't really invest in high-speed rail in the United States in any meaningful way until California high-speed rail.

Woo!

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, right, being governor of California makes you insane.

And every generation, there is a governor of California who wishes to govern as Kaiser Augustus.

So, Reagan, Jerry Brown,

Leland Stanford, probably.

I haven't checked if he was governor.

I think he was, yeah.

And now Gavin Newsom.

And so under that paradigm, you know, Augustus rebuilds Rome as a

city of marble.

Gavin Newsome is going to make it possible for you to get from Los Angeles to San Jose in 45 minutes.

Yes.

Now, one thing that's useful about California high-speed rail is the trains say California on the side.

So you remember where you are.

It's sort of like secession watch, you know.

That's another sort of peg towards A24's Chud versus Woke, right?

I always enjoy the, I always enjoy, I think there's a fun game to be had when you pick, see what train they've, the CGI people have picked to put in their renders.

So at the bottom, there's kind of like a TGV, like an Alston TGV type type thing in the, in the very Dutch-coded high-speed rail in the kind of the bottom picture there.

The top one, it appears to be one of the

Chinese,

kind of extremely pointy and slightly Zieman's icy Valaro type looking.

Yeah, it's something like that.

Notably lacking a panograph or overhead wire.

There was a brief period of time where a few state senators were trying to convince them to do battery high-speed training.

Jesus Christ.

That's the California

senator as one of the easiest and dumbest people to buy on God's green earth is why.

So long story short about California high-speed rail is California voters approve a ballot measure to build high-speed rail in California in 2008.

They got a legally mandated top speed of 220 miles an hour.

There's a lot of drama about construction costs and land acquisition,

the correct right-of-way, so on and so forth.

Construction takes seven years to get underway.

Right now, we're projected to get the, quote, initial operating segment, unquote, in the Central Valley between Bakersfield and Merced in sometime in the 2030s uh-huh i never knew who the singular form of mercedes was that's good to know it's it's future-proof you know yeah also sorry for completely no-selling a mercedes joke that was very good

that's right i deserved it and um you know time is money and we like to spend money so we're spending a lot of time building this

It's capitalism.

As I say on, as I've been saying on Railnett repeatedly, related to all sorts of HSU-related stuff, when your entire economy is based on extracting value from the bits around the thing that does a thing rather than the thing that does a thing itself,

of course, delivering actual things like infrastructure becomes impossibly expensive.

That's capitalism, baby.

Yeah, I mean, you know,

this is first and foremost the way to keep a lot of consultants employed.

And the transportation second.

Including, weirdly, Network Rail, who are the infrastructure operator in the UK, who are one of the major contract, like consulting contractors on California high-speed rail.

Network Rail take you a Californian vacation, huh?

Yep.

Yeah, but the guy who's supposed to be my line manager moved over there, gave up on me when I moved to my new job and decided, shout out to hi, Dave.

Uh, I moved over to California to work on the California high-speed trail.

It's hard to blame him when you look at sort of like, oh, I'm doing, you know, a permanent way on a sort of wet Wednesday in Middlesbrough.

I could be, I could be in beautiful California.

And you are British.

You do not know what this bit of California looks like.

You've never been to Truckee.

You don't know.

It's like, yeah, sure, let's do it.

yeah i'll go to go to beautiful you know i'm expecting you know san francisco constantly 70 degrees and you know beautiful weather year-round and actually no i'm here in fresno it's 140 degrees and incredibly humid

what climate change means yeah by living in it yeah yeah yeah but you can get the burger you can get whataburger you can get in and out that's a good point yeah

you know

california high-speed rail project is necessary because as slow and expensive as it is, the other alternatives, which were massive airport expansions or massive freeway expansions.

Sink it to the sea.

Or sink it to the sea.

They're much

more expensive and much worse for the environment.

But people still got mad about it, including a rich guy who stole a car company named Elon.

Alban.

Elon Musk.

Elon Musk.

Elon Musk.

Yeah.

This fucking guy.

I deserve a better class of nemesis is the thing.

Yeah.

What I don't know what there is to say about Elon that hasn't already been seen.

He's a wee fucking dancer, that's what.

He sells cars and spaceships and he renames websites.

Yeah, his whole life is based around want getting annoyed about the fact that his he he he thought it was cool when he was like twenty to name a company X and then that constantly got taken away from him by him being shit at everything he turns his hand onto.

And so he's continued to fail upwards.

Yeah, it would be like if i still combed my hair forward in the mice base way you know

yeah we can both wax nostalgic about the shit we were doing in the 2010s man oh jesus right now a lot of people think he's bad but back in 2012 this was less obvious unless you were really paying attention yeah everyone was still sucking his dick back then yes from alice avozandam elon

yeah

we got here we're gonna just do musk i think that's probably gonna be That's the safe one, isn't it?

Yeah.

I love that we're all just politely, silently waiting to find out what fun stuff.

Sorry, sorry.

I have Elon Musk and Grimes playing cards against humanity.

Oh, God.

That's actually a phenomenally good bit.

I hope Elon Musk builds his dumb tunnel only for both entrances to collapse, leaving him trapped underground where only one man can save him.

Elon cries up for help and Vern Unsworth looks down and whispers, you're a pedophile.

Yes, yes, Kay.

absolute queen of posting shit.

I love that.

Sorry for doing Twitter review here.

It's fine.

We're enjoying it.

We're looking at a picture of

a creep, a sexual offender, abuser,

apartheid white supremacist piece of shit.

Oh, this is from 2020.

Someday we're going to find out how Elon Musk won that pedo guy lawsuit, and it's going to be some James Elroy shit.

Some American tabloid shit.

So, weird story.

My dad was the guy in charge of that rescue because my dad does cave rescue.

No shit, really.

Really?

Doxing your own father on podcasts.

I've done it in worse places.

Um, and so he knows Vern pretty well.

And Vern, so this is why I have like personal hatred of this man alongside professional and other hatred.

Vern, a fundamentally good man who literally saved a bunch of kids' lives, was crushed by that lawsuit, as you'd imagine.

He was kind of taken for a ride by the big lawyers.

He was quite happy to just let it slide because he didn't give a shit about what

this prick said.

But you know, the lawyers are like, oh, we can we can sort it out here.

Well, it should have been a slam dunk, you know?

It should have been a slam dunk, but you know, rich white guys never, never lose.

And it's crushed Vern.

So shout out to Vern.

Hopefully he has no profile on the internet because the internet's horrible and he can just enjoy caving again.

But

screw Elon Musk for a million reasons, but particularly for

that.

Yes.

What was also transparently him being really butthurt?

Have I told the story about the fact the Australians nicked his submarine and probably have it somewhere?

Yeah, yeah, you have because

he took the fucking submarine prototype to the cave and no one would let him get near the cave because it obviously wouldn't work.

He got it into the first chamber of

maybe two or three hundred

and and it obviously just immediately got broken and stuck.

And the Australians just nicked it.

They thought it was fucking hilarious.

So they just nicked it in true Aussie style.

Come on, man.

They are a criminal bunch, though.

They turned it into

a barbecue, or as they say in Australia, a Barbie.

Yeah.

Either a barbecue or a beer fridge, one or the other.

Yeah.

Well, if it's broken in half, they can have both.

So anyway, Elon takes a look at the high-speed train he thinks is rubbish.

He proposes his own system with blackjack and hookers, the quote-unquote fifth mode of transportation,

the Hyperloop.

Let's get all H-bomber guy

on this man for it being quote-unquote an original Elon Musk idea.

Yes.

I mean, much like Tesla was an existing car company that Elon said was his, the Hyperloop is an existing idea that Elon said was his.

Yeah, it's just a bad idea.

There's some differences between the Hyperloop and VAC trained, but we'll get into how essentially they became VAC trains.

What's the big idea here?

Speaking of billionaires, I see Virgin on here, which means Richard Branson's grubby little fans have been on this as well.

Yes.

Man,

what an island.

A man who owns an island.

Yes.

Have we learned nothing about men who own islands?

Can't you just leave well enough alone, Richard?

Just go

gotta watch out for those kinds of people.

Yeah, just fuck off to your island.

Listen, I haven't said anything other than a true fact, which is that Richard Branson is a man who owns a private island.

That's all there is to say.

That's right.

Okay, so there's not quite a vacuum to beep all of the intermediate bit, please.

Yeah,

we can neither confirm nor deny that Richard Branson is a

yeah, we can neither confirm nor deny that he is a British Thai cave diver.

There's a pod.

It's not a train, it's a pod.

It's in a tube.

It's your red flag right there.

Yeah.

Whenever someone says pod,

you know, it's going to be a bad idea.

This was a tiny child, but I remember saying this of the London Eye, and I was right.

That shit has ruined the skyline in London.

One of my most controversial opinions.

Tear it back down.

I think it's.

Controversial, but correct.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Anytime I see London skyline on anything, it's like, oh, we've got a big fucking Ferris wheel on a sky.

So why do they keep including it on things?

Like, as if it's a feature?

It's like, it's a fucking Ferris wheel.

Why are you putting that next to the flipping House of Parliament and the Gherkin?

Just like, which incidentally is funny, because you can't see the Gherkin from any angle anymore as well, which is funny.

Yeah, it's blocked on the story.

The walkie-talkie and stuff.

I think it's

interesting that every other city decided they needed a big Ferris wheel too afterwards.

You know, Glasgow had a tiny one as part of like...

It was literally a fairground Ferris wheel, but they called it the Wheel of Excellence.

They had it in George Square for like six months, and then Edinburgh nicked it.

And so now I think Edinburgh still has the wheel of excellence like seasonally.

English.

They have like a much smaller one next to it called the wheel of mediocrity.

Every day of my life, I'm riding a wheel from New York.

Okay, so there's a pod.

It's not a train, it's a pod in a tube, right?

The tube is very low pressure, but it's not a full vacuum.

There's a big air compressor here in the front of the pod, right?

And that air compressor eats up all of the low-pressure air and either ejects it out the back or it puts it through little jets on the bottom, right?

That makes the whole thing float in the tube like it's a puck on an air hockey table, right?

Okay.

Yes.

Yeah, it's that stupid.

It is that stupid, Alice.

Yep.

There's no motor on the train.

What there are, the pod.

It's not a train.

It's a pod.

That means it's like when Margaret Thatcher insisted on the trains being called shuttles on the Eurotunnel.

Okay, Jesus.

Yeah.

So

this thing runs on linear induction motors, right?

Which is essentially you have a bunch of magnets on the track.

You have magnets on the train, and those are what propel the thing.

It's like a big, it's like a normal electric motor, but instead of being in a circle, it's unwrapped.

Come out of the thing with all of your credit cards demagnetized yeah it was refined by a chap from uh from lancashire called uh eric lathwaite

in the original video of them testing this on youtube with some great yeah guy voices

for listeners gareth is reaching behind him to a shelf on which there is a book here called i'm holding up to for everyone else to see uh transport without wheels by edited by eric lathwaite ooh put it away again i'm enjoying the little gareth connections you know

I think it'd be, you know, a transport without wheels.

Does that include horses, though?

Why not?

Well, maybe the viscera, there are horses in the original Hyperloop.

Yeah.

When they're

sucked into the atmospheric railway, yeah.

Yeah.

So, all right.

There's the linear induction motors are not continuous.

There's like a pad every 70 miles or so of linear induction motors that give it a little boost, right?

Or this is the original idea in the white paper that Elon Musk

has been playing Minecraft, hadn't he?

Yeah,

honestly, yeah.

Grief.

That's how powered rails work.

Yeah, there's a little patch of the little red ones, and you go, wee!

And then it slows down again.

You have to have another one, and you have to shove a redstone down.

And yeah, we've all been there.

Exactly.

Well, if you're smart, you use a lever.

That's cheaper.

Oh,

man, now I'm thinking about my highly elaborate electrification systems with redstone underneath, redstone.

Oh, man.

Now I want to play Minecraft.

God.

So these pods in the white paper sat 23 people, right?

And they're supposed to leave

every 30 seconds.

Uh-huh.

Right?

Yep.

I'm a part of that.

Yeah, that seems stupid.

Let's do this.

I don't know the numbers on this, but I have taken trains before in my life.

And of those trains, I would say almost all of them have had more than 30 people on them.

Yes.

And

they have more than 30 seconds of separation as well.

Yes.

Yes.

I have done the numbers on this, Alice.

I'm looking forward to being able to interject with them.

And you're right on everything.

Correct.

Yeah.

In the white paper, this is a maximum capacity of 2,760 persons per hour per direction.

You know, it's about two subway trains worth of people.

Yeah, the 2760 is about a decent, as I often end up saying, that's about as much as a decent bus service.

Yeah.

In fact, not even a decent bus service.

That's as much as

a bus service in Leeds.

Yeah.

They're supposed to travel at 760 miles an hour.

Some of the pods, instead of having room for seats, would have room for people to drive their cars on.

This motherfucker has never built a single thing that he doesn't want you to drive your Tesla onto, into, over, or under.

I love the idea of a 700-mile an hour fireball with a load of Tesla drivers inside it.

That pleases me.

California high-speed rail is called out several times.

Your boy Dave is just working on the surface.

You know, somewhere in rural California hears like the loudest rumbling in the world traveling very fast underneath his feet.

I just imagine all the manhole covers popping up into the air with loading flames

as it goes.

It's like that scene in Batman.

Well, no, because this was intended to stop your mate, Dave.

Yes, it was supposed to defeat Dave.

It was supposed to take Dave and defeat Dave and make him homeless.

That's a point against Dave.

Yeah, leave Dave alone.

Yeah.

California high-speed rail is called out several times directly for being expensive and slow in the white paper.

While this system, the Hyperloop, will be cheap and fast.

Keeping in mind, California high-speed rail has a design speed of 220 miles an hour, which is basically the bleeding edge of high-speed rail technology.

Here's the thing, and I often use

this.

I often use phraseologies that I've picked up from my favorite podcasts.

This is the thing.

You can say stuff,

and in this case,

the stuff is mine's faster than yours.

Mine's cheaper than yours.

And that's about as much science has gone into it as the thing.

Yeah, and as we'll see, that continues to be about as much science that has gone into it.

I was about to say, if you go through the old Elon Musk white paper, you see some of the diagrams in there.

And if you don't initially understand the diagram, it looks very fancy and scientific.

And if you do understand it, it looks like it was made by a moron.

Yep.

Yeah.

So here's the bait and switch.

Elon didn't actually want to build the thing himself.

He put it out there as an idea.

Right.

But unlike ideas for most ideas guys, entrepreneurs ran with this thing, creating a wide variety of Hyperloop and Hyperloop-esques.

It was like the hype in Hyperloop, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Elon Musk

distributing this and being like, okay, go do this, go kill high-speed rail.

Yeah.

This is why not great to go too in-depth on the technology aspect of it because the fundamental problems here aren't so much technological as everything else.

If you look at

50 Hyperloop companies, you'll see 50 different implementations of the similar ideas.

Now,

when this white paper comes out, there's immediately people who want to capitalize on this by doing renders.

Wow.

The burgeoning render industry of California.

This was my favorite

part of Hyperloop.

And this was like really early.

I think these are all from 2014 or so.

It's proper like early days.

like render on image type stuff.

This is okay.

Yeah, these are all from Hyperloop Technology.

No,

transportation technology.

Hyperloop.

Yeah.

Those guys, they got in early.

And what you can see here is Hyperloops obstructing navigable waterways.

Me and all my homies, hate boats.

Yep.

I love that they, what I love, and this sums up so much about Hyperloop, is that they've looked at fancy high-resolution pictures of long-span suspension bridges and they've gone, oh, in fact, they've not gone.

They've not done anything.

They've gone, huh?

I'm just going to put a load of low span, like a short span, low bridge next to that.

And that's fine.

I'm not going to learn anything from this high bridge with a long span.

That's just there for aesthetics, right?

Like, if the city of New York are like, I've heard of the Army Corps of Engineers, and I don't recognize their authority.

Yeah.

Like, the city of New York or the state of New York, the state of California aren't going to have any thoughts about me putting this kind of like shitty bridge next to their fancy bridge.

Yeah.

Also, not to sort of be the sort of security-minded person here, but the single easiest and deadliest piece of American infrastructure to attack instantly by virtue of the fact that you have a pressurized tube

connected by a bunch of very vulnerable spans across the water.

Yeah, no.

And also, bear in mind that you've got,

if the morons who are trying to sell this are to be believed, rather than the actual science and legislation about guided vehicles.

There are, you know, in a 30-second period, there are like 200 of these in quick, in quick succession.

So

you split one of these pipes, this thing's going to be spitting pods for about 30 seconds.

And good God, the carnage.

Whether you do it intentionally or not, if some like riverboat guy rams his riverboat into it, yeah, there's, there's going to be

you're going to have a little bonk from a garbage barge and it's going to

kill 50,000 people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In Philadelphia,

we already put the trades next to the children's hospital just to keep just to keep them ready.

Yeah.

And this is this is where, you know, if you sort of look at this and you realize one of the first problems here is anyone who was pushing this scheme did not understand

or have a desire to understand something called horizontal construction, right?

Where you dig stuff in a line, like the line.

Yes.

Yeah, that's a good question.

Is Is the line horizontal or vertical construction?

Ooh.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

But so, you know, there's two types of construction.

There's horizontal construction that's roads, bridges, railroads, so on and so forth, as opposed to vertical construction, which is mostly buildings.

I'm doing diagonal construction.

I'm trying to do vertical construction, but I'm doing it really badly.

That's like those.

Me is one of the city fathers of Pisa.

You know, and this is one of the fundamental, I think, misunderstandings or mischaracterization

at the core of the Hyperloop proposal is that it's going to be cheap because our guideway is cheap.

This is Romo.

No.

The shout out to Devin.

I say that so often either in my head or on Twitter.

And it's all, I'm channeling Devin every time.

Hi, Devon.

Anyway, you know, one of the ideas is, all right, we have the standardized tube.

We have the standardized column.

It's going to be real fucking cheap, guys, right?

Lol.

But here we can see that.

Every column is bespoke.

Every single one requires ground investigation.

Every single one is a bespoke design.

There is absolutely nothing.

Okay, you can repeat the cross-section, but you're doing a trial hole.

You're doing a borehole at every single one of those piles.

to adjust for the ground conditions.

Each one of those will be bored to either to a different depth or to such an immense depth that you don't have to worry about it.

Both are are very expensive.

Hall 811 before you dig.

I mean, just them calling it over and over and over.

It's our old friend, Sandy Loam, back again.

You know, like the thing that's defeating Hyperloop here is ground.

Yeah.

I think that's another one of the issues with,

you know, this is California high-speed rail in the Central Valley.

They're doing a sort of four-track viaduct here that I think goes into one of the stations.

This terrain is actually, as much as it is extremely flat, it's still difficult to build on just because of the geography of the central valley, how it's all these very deep alluvial deposits, right?

I was going to say, like, it might look the trouble with flat is that lots of stuff gets you don't get the nice

depositions of mountain areas where it all kind of sorts itself out when it's flat.

It's a load of all the different colored soups all smoosh into each other and it's all very uh heterogeneous.

Yeah, and it's uh it's also seismically active, and also you know, every hundred years or so, it floods to 20 feet.

So,

you know, there's a lot of problems even with building on the flat, which is, you know, what they assume.

Okay, it's all going to be the same as long as we're building on the flat.

You know, and you can do, you know, horizontal construction.

You wind up with lots of different conditions just because it goes so far.

Down here, you can see here's a huge right-of-way they got to clear for trend Maya, right?

Because not only do you need the actual space for the right-of-way you need space to work in um you know and you're also building over in this case it's also very flat but because it's the yakatan peninsula it's full of holes underneath um yeah full of holes lemurs sort of like rare plants yes um

jaguars subjugated cultures things of this nature things of this nature yes so you know this all and any of these generic guideway designs are cheap until you actually build the damn thing in the real world.

And that's sort of how you sell what you would call a gadget bond anywhere, which is something that's not a train and its main feature is it's not a train.

It's like, well, you know, the guideway is cheaper.

How is it cheaper?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We've never built one, so it's probably cheap.

So we don't know.

We can mark our own homework.

Yeah.

Yep.

You know,

in a, in this controlled or theoretical environment is cheaper than rail.

And then it turns out, actually, if you put put two steel rails on some planks and some gravel, it turns out to be even cheaper than whatever fancy guideway you have.

Yeah, because you stop having to do a bespoke bit of ground investigation for every single column.

Suddenly, you can kind of be like, oh, we can come back with a tamper and even that up.

Let's just put it on a continuous, squidgy beam.

That's fine.

I.e., ballast with rails on it.

Happy days.

That's another interesting problem with building in the Central Valley

because it's so flat.

There's nowhere to get fill from.

Yeah, just put it straight on the ground, no problem.

Yeah, you can put it straight on the ground, but if you got to go over a road, then you got to have like an artificial dip somewhere else.

I mean, I assume that is why they're using, I assume that is on California HSR, there.

I assume that is why they're using the

supporting columns for a viaduct rather than just fill.

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely one of the reasons.

And then other reasons, we'd have to go into a whole episode for that.

Sure.

Yeah, I've been storing up a California high-speed rail rail matter because it's such a to be honest, I feel like more of it needs to happen before it becomes an episode.

Yeah.

All right.

Here's where I start stealing slides from Gareth

about capacity.

Here we go.

Oh, yeah.

I need to talk here.

Right.

Okay.

So

I'm spooling up.

Firstly, apologies that all the text is weird on these.

These are from Rail Matter in a funny font.

And that font, not everyone has it because people are normal about fonts.

So this is a a sketch i did for a for a twitter thread i did ages ago to debunk um hyperloop and it was based on the fact that all the hyperloop kind of discussions including that this was that there's like a colorado sort of study that talked about this and and you look at all of them and there were two discussions happening about hyperloop one of them um is as as justin's already alluded to is um the technology itself they're going oh you know we're talking about the the technology the the vacuum tubes the the switches all the and and the discussions are like people would get busy talking about oh, is the technology viable?

Isn't it viable?

Vacuum, this, that, the other.

The other discussion they'd have is, oh, well, there's this enormous, if you create high-speed transport, there's this enormous demand, this enormous economic benefit of doing that.

And this would basically be this circular loop of either the reports talking about, isn't the technology marvelous?

Isn't it going to be wonderful when we have high-speed transport?

And they kept going round and round in circles, and none of them addressed

the key issue, which is you will transform the economic sum total of uh zero if your technology uh doesn't move anyone which is what yes because it's a pod that's what hyperloop did alice has already alluded to this with the there are only 20 people in this thing uh question mark uh point which is that it's a thing called system capacity system capacity is really easy to calculate you uh you go how many people are in the vehicle how many vehicles travel through the thing an hour and yes uh roz is absolutely right i've put up the suvat equations because this is a capacity question

The Suvat equations are, if you did my cat, I don't know if they call them that in the US, but certainly in the UK, the Suvat equations are basically the equations of motion based around like acceleration and time and distance.

So like S is displacement here

in this equation.

V and U are initial and final speeds.

A is acceleration.

T is time.

And you can do a whole bunch of fun calculations to work out using this equation the distance between your vehicles.

So if your vehicles are going really, really slowly,

then you can have them quite close together because the distance it takes for them to stop is short.

And so actually the thing that dominates the distance between them stops being like how fast they go and how quickly they break.

Why is this?

It's because both legally and from an obvious safety perspective, you want to have a safe braking distance between your vehicles so that if one

has a problem, has to break, the one behind it won't coblamo straight into it and result in your massive multi-pod pileup.

So you have to have a safe separation.

And that safe separation is

the distance it takes to, or the time it takes for the vehicle to stop, plus some tolerances for like reaction times of either the person or the technology.

Right.

So in the case of a train like the Hyperloop Nonsense, their trains are going, sorry, pods are going at like fast enough, like, well, like 1,000 kilometers an hour or 700 miles an hour, whatever number they've made up off the, off the top of their heads.

And so the separation you're looking at is like minimum about 30 to 40 seconds, right?

Minimum.

That's quite a short period of time.

Great, marvelous.

The trouble is, if your pods have 20 people in them, then that means that you're moving the jack total, the grand sum of like two, three, or maybe in a magical sense, 4,000 people an hour.

Bearing in mind that high-speed rail, HS2, if they hadn't been, if Sunak hadn't kneecapped it, was going to carry around about 20,000 passengers per hour.

So that's quite a lot more.

There is another technology that carries this small a number of people over long distances at high speeds with large amounts of infrastructure, and that is business jets.

So business jets are probably a lot cheaper and indeed higher capacity to just have a buy load of business jets and run them from A to B rather than building this system.

So that's a key thing.

Capacity, system capacity.

This thing is a huge amount of infrastructure being built.

As Roz has explained, the same amount of infrastructure as if you just built a train, and yet what it's going to do is move almost nobody.

Yeah.

This is not a good use of resources.

And like your only option here is like, okay, maybe you can somehow make the pods bigger, but that's also going to like increase your curve radius, the size of your infrastructure.

Or horror of horror is you make them into a train, which is also questionable.

Yeah, and there's a lot of fluid dynamics issues with the train getting longer.

It reaches

a weird German guy's name limit,

which is one of the reasons why the pod sort of of idea elevated is because you struggle to actually get a longer thing through the

kind of the low pressure environment.

You know, you're already fucked in physics when there's a long German guy in the background.

I know, right?

Yeah, God.

But the other thing is that

if it looks too much like a train, then people will put two and two together and realize that it's all a scam.

Because all of this, it has to look like pods because it has to, firstly, it has to look like cars to the car people.

But secondly, if it looks too much like a train, it starts breaking the suspension disbelief.

And you start going, oh, it looks like a train, but it's wrong.

And that doesn't make sense.

If your brain goes, that's a train, but bad, then the illusion falls, right?

So that's why these things have to look,

they have to have pods.

They have to look like somehow they're some magical fifth way rather than just being bad backwards trains.

Yes.

And I think a good comparison here, if you're more, if you want a more layman's comparison, the amount of infrastructure you're building for the capacity of the Hyperloop,

let's try and convert that to Chinatown buses.

So consider, this is the Feng Hua bus,

which did New York to Boston, New York to Philly, a few other places, right?

It has 60 seats.

There was also some seats up above for live chickens sometimes.

Right.

And so for all this heavy construction and technological development, groundbreaking new technology you're developing to put in this Hyperloop system, you get the same performance as 46 coach buses departing per hour.

And instead of high-speed rail, build Chinatown buses from Sacramento to Los Angeles.

That's exactly what Richard Wellings of the Institute of Economic Affairs wants to do.

And I'm not even joking.

He has written so many papers saying to replace existing railway lines with lots of coaches.

And indeed, we were going to do it out of Marleybourne.

We were going to do this to the Chilton mainline.

Alice, this will hit you different.

We were going to do this.

There were genuine plans to do this to the Chilton mainline, which was to convert it into a busway with high-speed buses like this.

I will not take a mega bus.

That is an onion article.

That was an onion article of

Obama's high-speed rail system being downgraded to high-speed buses.

What if we just ran these buses so quickly together that we could hook them together in sequence?

And what if instead of a roadway, we had their own sort of like dedicated lane?

And what if instead of tracks, it was

instead of a road, it was like some kind of like

metal track ballasted with stuff?

And what if instead of like tires, we gave them like steel wheels?

Carmike, Carmike.

There was a guy, there was a guy who worked at the Cato Institute, Randall O'Toole, but this is also his hobby horse.

All trains should be replaced with the business.

Well, they're just neoliberal bus guys just growing on stuff like fuck.

The thing is, 46 bus departures an hour is a lot of bus departures, but it's nowhere near the limit of bus terminal technology, as shown here at the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City, which serves 450 buses per hour at the morning peak.

So, what you're telling me is we run this concurrently 24-7,

fuck the carbon emissions whatsoever,

And we get 10 California high-speed rails.

Build more buses.

Not seeing a downside beyond the fact that the journey takes like seven hours.

Like, there's so many, like, we don't want to get into the pig and shit technology stuff, but

it's not really technology to point out some of the systemic issues here.

Like, there are so many points of failure with a system like this.

You also, because you're talking about lots of,

because each

individual bus has to carry around all of its stuff, all of its technology for a relatively small number of passengers.

That's a lot of weight.

And because it's on tires, it's damaging.

You require quite a lot.

You have to build a very strong roadway, which is expensive.

The Port Authority bus terminal is a very heavily built structure to deal with all this mass.

It's not an efficient use of resources, including the expensive bit of transport, which is drivers.

How many drivers have we got here for like how many fewer drivers if it was trains?

I would assume there's 450 buses per hour, and there's 450 drivers per hour.

What hopes?

Yeah, I hope all the buses have drivers.

You have to move to Edinburgh where they're trying to take the driver out of the bus.

Good good, good.

Driverless bus.

I stupidly did not use the restroom before starting the podcast.

I'm going to go to the bottom.

It's fine.

It's fine.

We'll riff for a bit.

We'll riff for a bit.

Yeah.

I mean, so this is the thing.

The Chinatown bus is an Americanism.

I would do this in terms of Megabus.

and

i don't mean to single out megabus as a brand specifically there are but we should the bus with dar o'breen on the back absolutely yeah yeah uh this is like the real dire

uh if if the like train system has failed for one reason or another then britain's last line of logistical defense is getting the mega bus um

run by angry homophobic scottish men yeah that's that's that's the thing that unifies basically all buses in in the uk is they're all run by like two angry Scottish riots.

And so

yeah.

And yeah, so you end up at like, you know, a bus station in Preston at three in the morning.

Or, for instance, you miss the last train from Edinburgh back to Glasgow and you need to get back to Glasgow rather than staying overnight.

Well, the only thing that does that rather than a 24-7 train service is a bus

and

a sort of minor circle of hell.

I did it once.

I got the bus from, for some bizarre reason, mostly probably skint student.

I was like, you know what?

I'm going to not get the train from

London to Aberystwyth.

And I got the bus from London Victoria Coach Station all the way to Aberystwyth.

And let me tell you, given that that's one of the, at the time, was one of the least punctual bits of railway line, good God, I would have loved to be on a train stationary in a flood

near Talerthig Loop rather than in that hell bus.

Like the bus had aircon.

It was, you know, it was fine as a bus.

In fact, you know, arguably comfortable as a bus.

Yet somehow it's hell.

Long distance bus journeys.

Oh my God.

I don't know.

I just don't.

No.

Get the train.

Difficult to get up and walk around.

That's it, isn't it?

You're stuck in place whereas you can stretch your leg.

You can go and find a quiet corner of the coast to fart in.

You just can't do that in a bus.

Yeah.

Buses.

Long-distance bus toilets as well.

There's a funny idea.

Don't go in there if you want to retain

Don't go in there if you're as wide as I am.

If you have hips as wide as mine, you want to get back out again.

You know, that you're doing a confined space rescue at that point.

I'm back.

I was talking about it.

Talking of returning from the toilet.

I wonder if the Hyperloop pod would have a toilet in it.

Oh, now that's what's funny is can you just take off a super robot

bully sucks you out of the shit and spits you into the tunnel.

Does the kind of like U-boat thing of of you can just sink the hyperloop pod using it incorrectly?

No, you have to stay there and plug the hole with your ass until you get to the station.

Hey, I suppose, would that be is that an enema?

No, it'd be a kind of colonic irrigation.

I mean, you'd be very clean right the way up through there.

Very, very

sort of the world record for anal prolapse, you know?

Oh, no.

Thank you for that sentence.

Just get sort of like Jim Henson all the way out for your asshole.

Call up Guinness for that one.

That's the thing.

I have a way with words that makes people want to listen to the podcast.

Yeah, I once said to somebody that I was going to make up a slutty little elbow.

I'm not going to say who I said that to.

Two ways of reading that, potentially.

Was it to Justin in anger?

Isn't my first question?

It is actually to read pretty frequently.

That was going to be my second question.

Was it to your now wife?

Yeah, did you later marry this person?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sorry, Alice is Jim Henson line.

I will not recover from that for the rest of my life.

So

anyway, Hyperloop Alternative 1, the Feng Hua Chinatown bus.

Fairly easy, much cheaper.

But if, you know, we're getting serious about this, we should talk about Sirius high-speed rail.

Oh, no, you're talking about it.

Yes.

And the purpose of high-speed rail, rail, you got to remember it's capacity first and foremost.

The speed is.

Beautiful, big, shoe.

Looking motherfucker, right?

The speed is useful because you drive modal shift, but also because you need fewer trains

to achieve the throughput.

The faster the train, the fewer the, you know, the faster it gets between destinations, the fewer of those trains you need to buy, which means you get smaller depots, which means there's lower electricity consumption, fewer drivers.

Overall, the system works well.

Obviously, there are other benefits of released capacity in the existing network, but I'm not going to talk about that because this isn't real matter.

Yeah,

that's one of the counterintuitive things about operating trains is the faster you go, the cheaper it is.

Yes.

The EU did a very interesting study, and it was the EU's totally

resultless year of rail a few years back.

And they did a very interesting genuinely interesting bit of academic work looking at externalities, which is a fancy way of saying thinking about more than just the cost of building the thing in the first place.

And the only mode of transport that actually pays for itself is high-speed rail.

All the others have externalities like health impacts, pollution impacts, all these sorts of secondary effects, including rail, you know, some of the side effects of rail, of conventional rail, that means that the cost, that the overall cost to a country for that particular transport system is negative.

The only one where that isn't true, including aviation, the only one that is that isn't true is high-speed rail, which does pay for itself for this very reason.

It's an very efficient way of moving people around.

The faster you go, the cheaper it is because the bills can't catch up with you.

Yes, especially when you don't pay them.

Yeah.

Especially when

you stop running TGV La Post.

Yes.

Looking in the mirror, and there's one of the Royal Mail trains, also a really sexy train.

There's the Class 325s, that's right.

I love them so much.

It's got the body of a 319, but the face of a 365.

Very, very, very strange.

Or face of a networker, sorry.

The 365 had the funny happy face added in retrospect.

Yeah, the networker.

The UK Rail Nerds, the GB Rail Nerds out there.

You know what what I mean?

Of course.

The old networker, my favorite train, because I used to get it to school.

Very

pleasant associations with the noise.

But yeah,

you look over in the rearview mirror, you see one of those gaining on you, you know.

But only three days a week.

Well, this is a very topical comment.

Sorry, everyone.

So, this is the N700 Series Shinkansen.

It has 16 cars.

It has about 1,500 seats.

It accelerates to 170 miles an hour in three minutes.

It runs 17 times an hour at the peak.

Oh, what are we doing?

You know,

that's a capacity of 25,500 people per hour per direction, or the equivalent of 111 230-seat Boeing 737 MAX 10s.

Yeah, which, you know, discounting the ones that the wings fall off.

Yeah.

Or

using the hyperloop capacity we discussed earlier, nine hyperloop tubes per direction.

So, still less than the full capacity Port Authority bus station building.

Yes, actually, it is still less than the Port Authority bus terminal.

Well, you got to think about it.

That's the best front to God.

We cannot stress this enough.

Yeah, well,

think about a rack of 18 Hyperloop tubes.

And now imagine it having an intersection with another rack of 18 Hyperloop tubes.

I'm pointing this out to people.

I was on the BBC, on BBC, like BBC's, one of their radio shows, and was pointing this precise fact out.

And I don't think Rory Kathlan-Jones, hello, Rory,

gave me my first BBC appearance talking about the bloody Hyperloop.

Rory Kathlan-Jones found this very funny, and his colleague didn't quite believe me.

And subsequently, has said, she owes me a pint because of Hyperloop going down the toilet.

But yeah, this is the key point to understand.

That's such a good visualization.

Hyperloop pod is about the same size

as this train that we're looking at on screen right now the n700 it's about the same size imagine nine or ten or eleven or twelve of these bearing in mind that the pods seemed to get smaller as the hyperloop development continued so they ended up going from like 20 down to like 18 or something they started at 40 and then it got smaller and smaller 20 of these tubes next to each other going across the landscape.

Bearing in mind the other point about Hyperloop is that all of the technologies pushing the all the companies pushing the technology none none of them talked about boring this underground all of them the business model that they was to do with them selling air rights question mark and having solar panels on the outside of the thing.

So all of them have modeled it on an above-ground system with 20 tubes

to have the equivalent capacity of a hydrograph system, 20 tubes running across the surface of the Earth.

For when you're doing this, nowhere on the planet could be literally spaced commuters from San Francisco to San Jose.

You would have an intersection with these things if there's a branch line.

And if you looked at it, you would enter some kind of Lovecraftian psychosis.

It would be a cognito hazard if you looked at that tangle of tubes.

Yeah, yeah.

I just, oh my God.

Just, yeah.

A brief word of note on the Japanese Shinkansen.

The reason these things accelerate so insanely quickly is partly because they have lots of stations frequently together, but also the engines on these things, the motors on these things have only got more powerful they make them super much like kind of stereotypical japanese housing they make these things super light like to the point where they don't have great crash worthiness and the reason they do that is because they build the infrastructure such that it has you know bearing mind it has to be super earthquake proof they build the infrastructure to have basically zero percent failure rate uh this is not a thing we can do in europe which is why our trains have to have crash worthiness but the the these trains are unbelievably lightweight and and they could do that they've thought of the safety system they've taken a different approach to what we've taken in europe Europe for high-speed rail.

But the Japanese trains are super light.

They have motors that are way more powerful than anything in the rest of the world.

And as a result of that, these things accelerate unbelievably quickly.

We're talking like a rocket-powered shit off a shovel.

It's good stuff.

And they've never crashed one.

They've had earthquakes.

They've had the track dislocated by earthquakes.

But they have a system that

can detect those sorts of failures.

They have infrastructure that's built to last.

They have designed a system that's phenomenally safe.

It's very, very impressive.

Honestly, spectacular.

There's a reason why people still imagine this stuff as world-leading because it is.

You know, it always amazes me about these things in Japan.

No eminent domain.

No compulsory purchase.

Nothing like that.

Somehow they still get stuff built.

Yeah, people believe in it.

People really vigorously believe in this stuff.

And

one of the things I find aggravating is I look at Google Maps.

Everywhere in the world, train just just invisible on Google Maps, right?

Not in Japan, the Shinkansen shows up really brightly,

the Shinkan-sen roots are really vibrant on Google Maps.

This is part of the Japanese psyche.

This is a fundamental part of

their lines of communication.

It might be premised on a lot of

alarmingly conservative and often, frankly, racist ideas, but Japanese social cohesion is no joke.

You look at our sort of like social discohesion

and

yeah, it's a discohesion.

We're dancing.

Yeah, it's uh, it's, it's, it's maybe not so good.

It's got some downsides, you know.

So, anyway, this train with massive capacity.

I'm not saying we have to be more racist.

Yeah, let's not be more racist and have no immigration.

There are other ways to society.

I'm saying that maybe

one of the ways that we could be more socially cohesive is embracing diversity.

Just a thought.

Yes.

Oh, nah.

So

this train, because it accelerates very quick, it can make lots of intermediate stops, still maintain a high average speed, serves more people, brings them to more destinations.

Now, what Elon proposed in terms of capacity was enough for existing travel demand from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

You have to factor in induced demand at that point, which Elon does not believe in.

So that's why, you know, if you're going to build a real system, you need, you need this capacity.

Shed loads of capacity.

You need, yeah, you need, you need Shinkansen and and not Chinatown bus.

So, you know, yeah, so you need dedicated high-speed rail on dedicated right-of-way.

Hyperloop cannot do that capacity just definitionally, just, you know, owing to laws of physics, unless you decide we're going to build a tube big enough for something the size of a 737 to go through.

All right, hear me out.

We put the Chinatown bus in the tube.

I think we do already, don't we?

Yeah.

Under the river.

The express bus lane on

the Holland Tunnel.

Yeah.

What if that had no air in it?

Or is it the Lincoln Tunnel?

Yeah, I can't have that.

And Chinatown bus with a kind of like air bladder on the top, like the old gas-powered vehicles from Regio One.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to uh people are annoyed by these so let me get to the point we have this thing called patreon right the deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month uh sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know it's two bucks you get what you pay for um it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

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Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want.

Or don't.

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Back to the show.

There's always one thing that irks me about this this is the stations

for these things.

What am I looking at here?

Where are all these people going in and coming out?

Where are all these pods stacking up?

What's going on?

Renderite.

It's all weird curves.

We did Art Deco.

I mean, Art Nouveau.

I like a weird curve, but when it's done with some degree of intentionality.

Well, yeah, exactly.

It's always

totally absent, like the actual circulation of the vehicles and the people.

like there's just there's there's no discussion of what these stations are gonna look like i would guess they would look more like the port authority bus terminal yes

yeah like the one in the bottom uh right hand corner but just like multiply that by four

so that it takes up like you know like like a hundred blocks like a fidget spinner i like the one on the top right with the like absolutely no sort of separation of one of those pods goes off the rails question mark it's just gonna wipe out everybody i mean i would imagine, I would imagine you,

you know,

you would get the Hyperloop out to the Hyperloop terminal and you'd wait in a queue for like 35 minutes to get to the platform, you know, with any of these designs.

I mean, there's just, there's no capacity here for having.

It doesn't have to be.

It comes back to the core point, which is that all this has to do is look.

vaguely plausible, right?

That's all these pictures have to do is look vaguely plausible to the layperson.

That's all these renders have to do is make it seem like it's legit.

And whilst for, for like, for all, for all of us, we look at this, these things and laugh, for unfortunately, the vast majority of people, and in fact, no, the people that can't, which is tech journalists, they see this and think it looks legit because it vaguely looks like city skylines.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, it's going to, it's going to be able to transport in,

I assume, 400,000 passengers per hour, whatever is happening underneath this roof.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, we just have to believe.

All right.

I stole more Railnatter slides.

Let's talk about the companies.

Let's talk about companies.

This is fun.

This is fun nonsense because there are so many of these.

So the first thing we're going to talk about this group of companies that invented a made-up trade association called Hyperloops Association.

As I said in Rail Natter, this is not me blowing up their logo to make it all choppy.

They actually have a choppy logo on their website, despite being like tech nerd people.

Anyway,

you suck, guys.

Hyperloop one.

Let's start with a simple one.

It's a real good 90s font.

I like this.

I know, right?

It is.

So

again, apologies for the typeface situation.

I should have sent Roz Appleberry.

It's a bit like Liam, you get mad at Roz for hard drives.

I should be getting mad at Roz for not having a font that no one has on their computer.

Yes.

Hyperloop One here, as we all know, this used to be Virgin Hyperloop One.

It was founded in 2014, the year after the alpha paper, based in the USA.

The last real update was in November 2020.

And its current status, as we all know, because that's why this episode is happening, is liquidation.

Yeah.

Funked.

DMI.

Oh, yeah.

Funks.

Mind for assets.

And this is important because this is the only company that actually shoves some people through a tube.

Two people.

And they didn't look very comfortable about it, even though they're very high-paid executives in the organization.

Yeah.

In fact, they looked a lot like they didn't want to be in there.

I mean, and they

brought them up to 107 miles an hour in a 500-meter tube.

Wow.

You know, and then they slowed them back down again, and then they left the tube, and that was the crude Hyperloop test.

And then RIP.

Yeah, slowly over time, what's transpired?

Within months of that test, they made half their staff redundant.

Yes.

So

it went well because this is the thing.

This, I don't want to dwell on this too much because

we need to

close the episode within four or five hours.

But

it touched reality.

This is the problem with the Hyperloo stuff.

As soon as it touches reality, people realize it's stupid as shit.

So this video went out and it actually just got like they put out all the comms for this and it got pillaried.

It got absolutely slammed, including by finally the tech journalists caught up and actually realized, oh, this is shit.

This is just shit.

And everyone realized, and it burst the bubble.

And as a result of that, because all these things exist as, is a load of, is vapor.

There's a reason this stuff gets called vaporware.

It exists as just noise, just hype.

As soon as it touched reality, very, these two people touched reality and the whole thing, the bubble burst.

And all their share price disappeared.

All the investors were like, oh, wait, this is shit.

And

it died.

Or rather, it didn't die.

As Ross is about to press another button, it pivoted.

It pivoted.

Pivoted.

I will note, it's not vaporware because it's an evacuated tube.

There's no vapor in there.

Yeah, there's actually less than that.

Well, eventually they pivoted to, okay, maybe this passenger Hyperloop stuff is going to be impractical.

So we're going to do something more stupid.

I like you talking about this so much, Roz.

I love it when you talk about freight Hyperloop.

What if you needed a 40-foot container of something instantly?

TGV La Post, clearly.

The list of people who need a 40-foot container of something instantly is like limited to people doing like, I don't know, human smuggling.

I don't understand.

I mean, if you, if you are shipping large volumes of cargo that need to go somewhere quickly, right now, you don't do it in a shipping container.

You do it in a 53-foot dry van or whatever the equivalent in Europe is.

You do it with a truck trailer.

I just realized how big a 40-foot container is, and I've just imagined a TGV hauling one of these on a flatbed.

And I'm going to be thinking about that for the next several hours.

There's

so the idea of the cargo hyperloop is you're shipping these containers around at hundreds of miles an hour.

But if you're shipping containers inland, usually they just came off a boat from China or Europe, which took several weeks.

So

you're shaving off a couple days from the schedule.

That's several weeks.

You do the last mile really, really, really, really quick.

Yeah.

And chances are you're shipping it inland only a few miles to a distribution center.

Yeah, no one has a railroad spur, and absolutely no one has a Hyperloop spur.

So it's going to go on a truck again.

Yeah, it's going to go back on a truck.

And since it's a container, you got to worry about the container chassis, which are a horrible perennial problem with people shipping containers.

That's, again, that's why the 53-foot dry van is nice.

It has the wheels on it.

You've got to do it.

Wheels are attached.

You've got to build some kind of container terminal that can handle one of these coming in every 30 seconds.

At a billion miles an hour.

At a billion miles an hour into like,

and then take it out, put it on a truck and get that truck out of the door in time to then be ready for the next one.

Yeah.

And I mean, we sort of have that at like major ports.

You have the automated like overhead cranes.

It's onto a train.

Yeah, it drops them onto a train.

Or you have like the thing where five trucks line up at the end of the thing,

but all the drivers have to get out and hold a button because it might accidentally drop a container on the cab because it's automated.

Those things are pretty crazy.

They're very, very high capacity and they're very efficient, but you have to...

Do all all five drivers have to hold one button because that sounds very intimate if so no there's there's five separate buttons

oh that that's the sound fiction bubble yeah that's a shame yeah on the aos other

five separate truck drivers

otherwise someone might stay in the cab and get crushed by a container of soybeans yeah yeah you have all this incredible efficient technology the automation the cranes um the the the weird relationship with organized labor at the port um the all this good stuff um and you get your containers onto the train, um, and then it goes onto the single track with short loops section of line from Felix Dow to Ely,

which is where almost all of Britain's stuff comes from.

Sabotageable infrastructure.

No, do not do this.

Do not do this.

British Transport Police mortar platoon will hunt you down.

Yeah, you can have something that gets the containers there much faster, but at a much lower capacity for no reason.

Um, so this was the secondary idea is let's do Hyperloop Cargo.

And they found out

no one actually wants this.

Yeah, I mean, this is already an idea.

Like

they're trying to find a niche for it now that it's fallen through on passenger freight.

And what's funny is that the only people who care about freight are freight people.

And all the freight, unlike passenger stuff where lay people and just regular people go, oh,

I move.

Oh, no.

That's not a good thing.

Freight people do nothing without several hours of spreadsheets.

They play football manager for fun.

They frighten me.

Yeah.

So those the idea of pivoting from passengers where you have, you know, millions of stupid people who think, oh, that's actually a thing.

And to pivoting to freight where everyone is a maniac.

Yeah, to go

to a guy called Torsten, who has never been a second late or early for anything in his life.

They're going to laugh you out of town.

And that's exactly what the new investor after Virgin ran away, DP World, lol, tune tune into all previous trash features.

DP World then decided to invest and then immediately decided to disinvest,

hence the demise of Hyperloop, because funnily enough, freight was an even dumber idea than passenger Hyperloop.

DP World being Dubai ports, not the other kind of DP.

So,

I don't know, Roz, if there was anything more you wanted to say about this.

I love it when you talk about Hyperloop cargo.

All I can say is

I don't understand.

I, you know, I think there's people are too obsessed with containers when a lot of stuff doesn't go in containers and, in fact, shouldn't go in containers.

Bring back brake bulk, bring back the longshoreman.

Yeah, or now, this may be Hyperloop work if you've got a longshoreman to like fill it with, you know, fill it with potatoes or whatever.

Sacks, yeah,

green carrier Hyperloop pod.

Oh, man.

Well, the thing that's wild is since there's so much excess capacity heading back to China that we've gone back to like 19 or like 1880s methods of handling cargo which is you know um you have a container and you put a plastic sleeve in it and then you fill that with bulk soybeans right as opposed to having like a bulk soybean freighter which you know is what you would have done in like the 70s yeah you know we're back to we're back to grain doors like on old-fashioned boxcars um

yeah yeah yeah

So, yeah, so that's the end of Hyperloop One.

Bye-bye, yeah, Hyperloop One, bye-bye.

And then we land with the other, so these are kind of in a, in, in, in, in like order of-ish bigness of what they're trying to do.

How many we're gonna blast through here?

And we're on slide 26 out of 62.

So,

you better believe I'm gonna pick up some speed.

Don't worry.

You're making that damn date.

Um, so Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, uh, founded even earlier, 2013, again, USA, uh, founded by,

there's, in fact, they're all, again, listen to the trash feature that Roz was on,

where there's so many weird little guys involved in this.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies had a weird little guy.

So Hyperloop One had, what was his name?

He recently renamed himself to something else, which is also kind of funny.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hold on.

Bam, Bam, Brogany, Bam, Bam.

Yeah,

Brogan Bam Brogan.

That's the one.

Brogan Bam Brogan.

You should make him change his name to Brogan Bamboo.

I mean, changing your name to something something silly is only cool when the name is cool or you're trans.

Correct.

So this was this, the guy involved in Hyperloop Transportation Technologies was Bebop Gresta.

We're going to touch on this guy later.

Those words used possibly more accurately than I intended them to be.

The current status of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is that they have made two mock-up pods.

They've had a test track in France rejected.

And they've run out of money because they've merged with some other organization like some weird sort of fund.

So they're dying.

Bye-bye.

Had patrons together.

Brogan Van Brogan Brogan left acrimoniously

with them.

Oh, dear.

Yeah.

Bad pump.

Bad

HR.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

So next one.

Let's go.

So from the USA, we must head north to Canada.

Canada.

2015, we had a thing called TransPod

founded.

This is a funny name.

In fact, on the rail matter, people in the chat made the joke that this sounds like actually quite a good podcast for trans people.

I was thinking that you come out the other station when you when you take the when you take the trans pod, you come out the other station a different gender.

Based in Canada, of course.

Yeah.

Based in Canada.

Founded in 2015.

Its last real update was

none ever.

It's done so many little press releases about nonsense.

This is the one that is trans,

this is yeah,

this is the one that Roz was talking about on TF about.

um anyway but i'm not going to stop tf referencing basically this one is talking now about plasma question

plasma technology for power um they also seem to have sort of since hyperloop one went bankrupt they're trying to disassociate themselves from hyperloop technology even though they're doing the same thing um they're like oh no this is our own thing you know it's like that the the comic where you know the the I made this and then the other person takes and is like, I made this.

And then that was Elon Musk with VAC trains.

And then this guy is doing that a second time.

Yeah.

It's got a little flag of plasma attached to it.

Yeah, exactly.

You know,

it's better for you than a saline solution.

So they're grifting.

They're just grifting.

They're managing to have credulous journalists still publish their nonsense as if no one's ever heard of Hyperloop.

So you can go back through and look at transport news articles from like local Canadian news,

kind of regional Canadian news.

And it's weird.

It's written about as if Hyperloop has never existed, as if as if people have never heard of it.

Really strange, but you know, part of the problem.

Right, let's jump forward together.

Let's leave transport to it.

So,

2016, Heart Hyperloop.

We have to go to the Netherlands.

Hi, guys.

It's Heart Hyperloop.

And the last real update from Heart, to be fair, was October 2023 because we are entering the Grift Loop.

Forget Hyperloop.

It's the Grift Loop.

Do you know what's a good organization to get loads of cash out of?

Oh, I see its flag right there.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's the European commission it's the eu hooray

let's take millions of euros from the eu to do stupid i missed that i missed when that was us you know i missed when we could do that yeah i mean this is the thing right you you travel around europe and you see like a sort of like a pig pen in poland that has a big like funded as a project of the european union pig shit development agency thing on the front and you're like i miss that we have grifts we have perfectly serviceable grifts and we've robbed ourselves of the opportunity of building their entire country based on grifts and flin flams yeah yeah we're great for this stuff anyway yeah heart hyperloop um

they they've managed to grift um they they put they stored some pipe in a goods yard a literal good yards on the border on like the the border

settle down

i don't know if that was a comic effect yeah on the uh

on the uh yeah the spray balls coming out on the um on the uh outskirts of ghent i think there's like some like just goods yards or some rail goods yard, ironically, because there's always a railway.

And there's just some pipe being stored there by this company.

They haven't actually assembled it in any way, and they've been given 12 million euros of cash for that.

I mean, the thing is, to the EU, this is less than nothing.

You can write to the EU with like a letterhead you made yourself and be like, can I have 15 million Euros?

And they're like, yes.

And as we'll see as we go through these companies,

correct.

That's exactly what you can do.

So this company, so, okay, they've got their millions of Euros, but in an indication of their health, they're merging with another company, which is Zeleros or Thelaros,

because we are going to Spain.

This is

a Spanish company that appears to have hijacked the Extinction Rebellion logo for confusing reasons.

Founded in 2016, based in Spain.

The last real update from these guys, December 2022.

So again, kind of some, when I'm saying a real update, by the way, I mean that something, that it's not a grifty renderite announcement.

It's like some actual thing has happened on their website.

Current status of Delaros is that they have one mock-up.

They have one small pipe.

Same.

All for a whole 15 million euros of EU cash.

My 15 million Euro pipe.

Just got 15 million euros of cash for

just for a pipe in it.

Quite spectacular.

I've put pictures in for this because it shows.

I want to show some things.

So two pictures here.

On the left, you have what looks like, like, to be fair, quite a snazzy-looking

sort of studio type.

This is the kind of thing that 15 million Euros off the EU buys you is a little bit.

Exactly.

And what it buys you is buying all the stuff off the last incarnation of Jordan F1 team.

No shit, really?

I mean, not literally, but they've basically, what they've done is literally taken this stuff.

They've bought a load of stuff probably off like auction from the last low-tier F1 team that failed because all of this stuff is just stuff they've bought and arranged in a room.

None of it makes any sense either.

Yeah, YouTube and accelerate him to relativistic speed.

They all have like a drill.

The dressing thing here is the laptop charger plugged in.

That's the only thing that's actually doing anything.

And so, and you might think, oh, but wait, there's like a jet engine ass looking thing in the middle.

That's surely something.

They're doing something with that.

It looks very nice.

No, all that is, is a plywood mock-up with a screen in it with some seats inside that looks like what a pod might.

No technology.

It's just a plywood mock-up.

It's small as well.

So it's a scale mock-up.

I think it's like to have, yeah, it's like half-size type situation.

But even though it's half-size, you can see in the picture next to it that it's only got like six seats in it, even though it's a shrunk mock-up.

Spectacular.

Anyway, that's what we're looking at.

It's a fancy room.

Yeah, it's a very fancy room.

I mean, it's a fancy room or it's a manure

silo.

Actually, because I'm pretty sure manure silos are built in the same way with the kingposts and the sort of concrete slats.

I think, actually, based on this gradient back here, the whole thing's a green screen.

Yeah, hyperloop isn't real.

No, not only is it real, it's not real on a sort of second order of abstraction.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Next, next, because here's what they've actually got.

When I talked about their small pipe,

oh, wow, that's

what it is.

I was expecting at least a big wide pipe, but for like a really short, sort of like a, you know, girthy pipe instead.

It doesn't even have any sort of thing to fit a vacuum pump onto it's literally just like a weird small model mock-up type thing that's wild just what it's what what's what's proof going on here proof of concept man can create pipe

exactly so um let's let's jump let's let's leave teleros behind because you know that i think i should share the kind of like vibe of this very small kind of like uh you know spanish industrial estate because it's like this is exactly the way that you get money out of the eu is you are in an eu country you're in an underdeveloped region economically of that EU country.

And you go, do you want to invest in northern Poland, fucking, you know,

southern Spain, southern Italy, whatever.

And the EU is like, yeah, love that.

Love to.

What are you doing?

You're like, building a pipe.

It looks like the

Super Mario Brothers.

It looks like the Top Gear Technology Center.

Yeah, quite something.

So next, we're going to talk about Novomo, who used to be called Hyperlink Poland.

We talked about Poland.

This one's breaker.

This one's fantastic.

This is so good.

I see some more EU stuff on here.

I see some.

You better believe it.

Industry awards.

Yeah, I put in some industry awards because it's like, you know, the grift is real.

The big circle jerk of like money, you know, just people who think they're great, pat each other on the back, you know, B2B magazines getting all happy with each other.

Right.

So founded in 2017, based in Poland, formerly Hyperloop Poland.

The last real update quite recently, September 2023, because these guys have done the clever thing.

They're a bit like Roz was saying about TransPod.

They've given up on Hyperloop and they've given up on, well, ish, given up on Hyperloop, but they are riding on its coattails to kind of...

While I'm reading this slide, I'm doing the worst presenter thing anyway.

Sorry, everyone.

I've got into bad habits.

Right, these guys, basically, they're pushing something that's even funnier and more stupid.

So next slide, please.

I just want to point out here the best Polish hardware startup to watch in 2023.

Yeah, it's after those guys who invented the screen door.

No, no, they beat the guys.

They beat the guys who roughly like half the amount of labor required to screw in a light bulb.

So this is off their website.

Yeah.

They're trying to like basically, again, they're trying to

make, they're trying to basically get investment for an idea that's ultimately as stupid as Hyperloop, arguably even more stupid.

Once again, they're like, look, you take this train that has comfort, capacity, and what you do is you turn it into this small coffin-sized ass thing that looks like the Glasgow subway.

It's an easy translation.

And then also, so what it's saying is, but what you could do is to carry Hyperloop pods on the existing railway.

Ooh,

I'm pretty sure this was in.

This is a train.

What?

Correct.

And this was in Railroad Tycoon 2.

The magazine that worked on existing rail.

Some of the stupidest shit ever.

So let's have a look at the next picture, which is from their video or their website, kind of pitching what this thing is.

So what they're saying is you build a load of additional kind of moderate infrastructure on the existing track.

So you add a load of extra bits and pieces, including this big long maglev strip that goes down the middle of the track, which, by the way, will not work.

For starters, where does any of your signaling system go?

Because lots of that relies on Belizees in the forefoot.

But anyway, so that's why I'm- You don't need to use use phones or something.

Hand signals.

Use phones or something.

Exactly.

Use an app for it.

So they've done this little test track where they've carried, well, this thing, this like bomb disposal robot ass looking thing here.

It's just, yeah, quite rubbish.

So what is the actual...

So let's go to the render.

Everyone, you've all been waiting for the render.

Let's get the render up.

Let's get the transport fever loading screen ass render up.

Here is a transport fever ass loading screen, but with

a with what looks like a shiny tampon riding on the near track.

This is funny for a variety of reasons.

Firstly,

why do we think that we have to limit speeds of trains in the first place?

Well, in case we

won't be able to say that women's uteruses will fall out,

people's uteruses will fall out.

That's wokeness right there.

Yeah, that's woken.

We can't even win.

We can't even remember to like using inclusive language.

Yeah.

Using inclusive language.

Appalling.

If we didn't have DEI, we could run every train at 400 miles an hour.

Exactly.

Yeah, no.

So this thing,

it's like, once again, it's like the people designing this thing don't understand the actual...

The reason trains have to go slower is either because there's a train in front and it has to go slower so it doesn't catch it.

Right, I've solved this.

I've solved this.

Back of every train, right, there's a red light.

Instead of that, you put a sick ramp.

You just perfectly jump it.

Easy.

There was a system developed for that in the 1800s.

Oh my God.

That was seriously considered.

I can't say a fucking thing about a train without you going.

By the way, in Lithuania in the fucking 1790s, one guy filed a patent.

I'm the only person who knows about it.

So two reasons.

Number one, because other trains are around.

Number two, because of curvature.

You can't like having fancy new technology is not going to change the fact that you have curvature on a railway that limits speed because of the comfort of the the of the human meatbags inside it right so this thing what's it going to do okay on the various sections of short straight between curves that exist and some of them maybe you know you maybe get a mile of straight five miles of straight in the in an extreme situation but you get a length of straight and it accelerates up to a bit faster than a normal train would then has to slow down again to regular speed to go around a curve the trouble is even in doing so it's then caught up with the regular train in front so it has to slow down anyway so what and and to achieve this nothing you've invested in a huge amount of additional complex and intrusive infrastructure on the existing railway it makes absolutely no sense and it's hilarious so uh next slide has no capacity either one thing i want to point out is this has been tried before oh yes yeah

there's the the the german rail zeppelin what if we put a big propeller on the back of a passenger car all right yeah it worked it also had the potential to turn people on the platform into a fine paste um you know Don't worry, this is going to happen to me when I stand on any platform.

So, yeah.

And so, you know,

it could go very fast, but then it had to slow down around corners since it was a propeller, of course.

It didn't accelerate very fast.

And then we weren't satisfied with this.

So we did try it again in the United States.

Oh, yeah.

The M497 Black Beetle, which is a Bud R D C with a jet engine on top from a B36.

This is the same concept fundamentally when it comes right down to it, except that this actually has some amount of crash worthiness.

Yeah, whereas the the giant tampon is it is does appear to just be made out of carbon fiber, which I look forward to the shards of carbon fiber separating all my various internal organs from each other with pinpoint accuracy.

Truly nothing new under the sun.

Yeah, talking of which, Swisspod.

Swisspod's fun because it does precisely what Roz just intimated.

So let's talk about Swisspod, founded pretty recently, actually.

They were really late to the party, just like the Swiss often are, very late to the party, out of date with what's going on in the world.

Sitting on a

golden tanker cat.

Fucking shit.

Excuse me.

Women's suffrage.

So hello to the Swiss.

You have lovely trains.

Actually, I have a lot of time for the Swiss people.

That's because they don't have DAI.

Exactly, yeah.

So the non-DEI Swiss, the last reel update from this thing, sadly, though, is very short-lived because the last reel update was in July 2021.

And they built

a nice circle in the kind of the yard of their

campus building.

Switzerland loves building large circles under things.

They do they do under, over, next to, big circle, or in this case, a small circle made out of drainage pipe.

And they got three and a half million Euros of EU cash in the process to do so.

How the fuck do they do that?

That's why Switzerland's not in the EU, is my question.

Well, indeed, but this is because

the Swiss

Regional Development Fund can tap into European Commission money for projects that can feed into the EU.

Fuck, can't we do that?

Sorry.

Not to go too long.

We're trying with Horizon, aren't we?

You know, we're trying.

So there's some nice happy pictures.

There you can see it's just a little circle.

It's quite a big circle.

I mean, it looks like fun, but fun in the way that you could probably get a hamster to run around in it and not much more.

I don't know.

The trouble with it being an infinite loop is I don't know how Europe thinks it's please let us waste your money.

Oh,

well,

you just have to disassemble it.

Take one of the segments out, and then you have the perpetual hyperloop.

You're just on it.

Yeah, exactly.

Like anyway, it's weird, but they're all very happy doing a little yay in the middle of their nice circle.

So that's good.

I'm glad they got 3.5 million euros of EU cash for that.

What's funnier about Swisspod is that they call themselves the natural inheritors of...

Next slide, please.

Swiss Metro.

Yeah.

Oh, I remember this.

We've talked about this before.

Swiss Metro is what Elon Musk directly,

this is what H Bomber guy should be doing the video about Elon Musk on.

Is that Elon Musk very directly stole the Swiss Metro concept?

And you can see that a lot of the renderite people also stole the Swiss Metro concept when they created their renders because this picture created by, like, let's face it, two really old retired guys,

like using like, what was it?

Using Bryce 3D.

There's a deep cut for any of the 3D.

This is a very old company.

This has direct continuity with the RAND Corporation version of the idea.

This is the actual inheritor of the VAC train heritage.

Yes.

You notice it is an actual train as opposed to a

you can see that there are multiple vehicles in there, which is partly the reason why it couldn't work because of the long German name principles.

So

they are Swiss Metro.

So the Swiss pods say they're the inheritors of Swiss Metro, even though they're not, because Swiss Metro-NG still exists and still say they're going to create their own Hyperloop.

But we're going to ignore this.

So they're Swiss Metro.

Shout out to their comedy late 90s website.

I love a logo that uses clip art.

It just makes me so happy.

Next slide, please.

Right.

Okay.

So that's sorry.

This concludes our first group of Hyperloop people.

These are the big hitters, as it were.

They're the big players.

Now we get into the weeds of the real

league.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

Let's start by talking about China.

China.

China.

Yeah, CASIC, or the, oh, God, I have to try and remember what the acronym stands for.

The Chinese aeronautical and science...

It's like an aeronautical company from China.

Founded in, this company founded in 1999.

They were not doing Hyperloop stuff in 1999.

Basically, my belief...

The Air Space Science and Industry Corporation.

Thank you.

Thanks, Alice.

That's a lot of stuff.

They're China's largest maker of missiles.

Good for them.

Hooray.

Well, that's why they've done it.

So basically, that's kind of the reason the reason this they've done a Hyperloop thing, which is they've only done one Hyperloop thing.

And if you go to the next picture, they've created a test track and a pod.

My belief is that this is basically just

so that China can say they have a market presence in Hyperloop, just in case it does become big.

I don't think they've actually done anything.

Yeah, so you just have like a state-directed thing of like taking your equivalent of Lockheed Martin and being like, do some bullshit and call it a Hyperloop.

Sure.

Exactly.

That's what I believe this is, because this test track it looks like it's basically just like tent material stretched over just like probably a normal maglev test track that they probably have somewhere kicking around.

Yeah, because

they got like that maglev they put on display a while back and I don't think it has a test track for it.

They just say they have it.

Yeah, and they are doing some stuff with, they're talking about doing some stuff with high-speed test tracks for maglev as well.

But again, I think it's a little bit of a like, we look like we're doing this, but bear in mind China had the battle of maglev versus conventional rail and conventional rail absolutely won.

Hence, they built tens of thousands of kilometers of it in like a decade.

So that's China.

Let's move on from China and we're going to go to Zamania.

We are going to Germany.

Go off the ride.

No, this one has tums in it.

You won't get into

hyperloop.

Yeah, it's not hyperloop.

It's the thing that my stomach experiences when I eat a jolly bee hot chicken sandwich.

Oh, a tummy hurt.

Yeah.

So this is one of the...

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Is it Tun because it's Technisches Universität Münken?

Javol.

Ah, for fuck's sake.

Okay, of course it is.

So this is like lots of the Hyperloop, kind of these sort of pseudo-companies, is that they come out of

venture capital wanting to exploit the cheap labor of PhD students

to create a load of IP and patents that they can then license.

That's kind of the other background.

So mainly Hyperloop is to stop California High Spirit happening, but also it's a secondary grift of venture capital trying to create ip off cheap labor i.e uh gullible students

who've done a few things like this i've seen some of their like weird walking machines along the same lines of like yeah the we got like a lab to do this and it's some good press for us i guess back when i was at drexel i was on a formula sae team and you know when hyperloop came around they started the uh the drexel hyperloop team

and uh what they did is after they moved the formula sae team into a new building then they gave half the lab space over to hyperloop

deeply involved in the crimes of the nazi regime drexel fucking probably yes yeah

fuck that school man

it's fun to go to it's fun to go to civil engineering school while the civil engineering civil engineering school is being dismantled

so um the current status of these guys uh they have a mock-up and they got some very gullible

regional ministers and prime minister to come and stand with a shovel in a car park next to some dirt that appears to have just been laid there.

Cool.

It's kind of strange.

They just like laid some dirt out for them to stand next to, next to a render, and they haven't actually built anything.

The render is a pod on a scissor lift and a tube.

Now, you can barely even call that a tube.

That's just, I mean.

It doesn't go anywhere.

It's a segment.

It's a short segment.

Is that Marcus Soda in the middle there?

I think it is.

Jesus Christ.

It quite possibly could be.

The sort of paramount leader, the Kim Jong-il of Bavaria.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it is.

Yeah.

And it's all the other thing is like, it's all these happy, gullible people who are involved in the process standing in the background.

Like lots of young, bright things.

This is another thing that aggravates me is that you get all these bright young things, like these, these kind of corporate but well-meaning students across the world, including in my former university in Edinburgh, getting involved in Hyperloop stuff and thinking it's the future and not putting their bright, happy, enthusiastic minds into rail stuff.

This is a lot of human capital that's being wasted here.

There are lots of reasons that Hyperloop makes me very angry.

It sounds like they're getting addicted to heroin.

Hyperloop, not even once.

I mean,

Bavarians can get very mad at me for everything that I've said wrong and mispronounced.

But the one thing I do know about Marcus Certa, if that is in fact him, is that

he did try to have a Bavarian space program as an announcement.

So just build a build a fucking train, man.

We're going to have the railroads in Germany.

The first beer on the International Space Station.

I think of Bavarians.

I've been listening to, because I have a bizarre obsession with Werner Herzog, I've been listening to him read out his own sort of memoirs, which is great.

It means I have Werner Herzog in my hand.

You must look into the

yeah, he's uh he's a remarkable man.

I'm just imagining like what would Werner Herzog say about the Hyperloop because he has thoughts on everything, he has thoughts on like the most niche television, you trashy television.

He's watched it somehow and will have extensive thoughts on it.

Yeah, this is this is part of the like uh the CSU because the CSU is like separate from the CDU.

I may have those the wrong way around, but so he has this little Bavarian fiefdom.

Um, and one of his ways of like sort of propping it up, um, rather than you know, to try and stop voters drifting to the AFD or whatever is a huge amount of investment in aerospace,

thus the space program, and thus also this.

And a lot of that is being like funneled through the Technical University of Munich.

So this is all, this is deep Bavarian conspiracy shit that's happening here.

And on top of that, I'm just thinking about how you pronounce Hyperloop if you're a German.

And I keep coming back to like

Hieperloop.

This man

is personally investing half of the GDP of Bavaria into keeping all the exhibits at the Deutsche Museum running all the time.

The only museum I've ever been in where all the interactive exhibits worked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That and the pump they must use to make the weird

weird wave in the Englische Garden where everyone does surfing.

Anyway, that's a musician.

Oh, that's a good one, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

Let's move on quickly because there's nothing quick about me going through these slides, even though I hope there would be.

Founded 2016.

We're talking about Delft Hyperloop here.

Again, it's a university situation.

Hi,

Netherlands.

Hi, everyone.

Actually, the Netherlands, I used to listen to a Netherlands drum and bass radio that was so good.

And their drum and bass was excellent.

And it was really funny because, as with so many European radio stations, they'd be like, in Dutch, be like,

fuck yeah.

I used to love that shit.

It was so good.

Anyway, right, moving on.

So honestly, I actually have nothing bad to say about Delft Hyperloop other than the Hyperloop shit because honestly, it's just a bunch of students just like tinkering and vibing and presumably taking extensive kind of recreational drugs.

And

who's to say whether that's bad or not?

It's good to rip off universities.

Someone who did that extensively to Temple University.

I mean, let's keep moving.

Oh, Ross, you found a graphic of Arriva.

Okay, Arvo was right.

It was so funny.

It was such a funny thing.

I don't know much about Arriva because it feels like a thing from Doom Eternal.

So

Arriva were founded in 2016.

They're based in the USA.

I don't think there was ever an update ever.

It's a bit like a transport situation.

They've never done anything real.

They were liquidated two years later.

But Ross has found

one video, and I got a still from it here.

The idea is they take a highway lane and they make these ultra-fast sleds that go on them.

And then you drive your car onto the sleds, and then it goes really fast.

Was this

before or after, exactly?

Was this before or after Musk did Boring Company?

I'm not sure.

The funny thing is that I would laugh so much if Musk stole his idea for the stupidity, you know, his idea that lasted, what, like 18 months or something of the stupid little skids, little tea trays with the cars on it.

Because that disappeared.

If he copied this, that's so funny.

I think this was slightly afterwards, but the funniest thing is they do all this renders, and it's like, okay, here's the ramp where you go on the arrivo, and it's like on one side, the cars drive off the pod, and it disappears into the ground, And then it comes back up the other side, flipped around somehow.

And then you drive your car.

It's so fucking, it was, and it accelerated so quickly.

It was just, it was hilarious.

It was, it was like,

how did it accelerate?

It would like accelerate so quickly that the brakes on the vehicle would fail and it would just leave a row of vehicles behind to get

rammed around by the vehicle fucking and it would get pancaked into the ceiling of this thing by the one behind.

I love that.

I love that.

That's such a good fit.

I'm a little bit confused as to why it's enclosed at all.

You know, are they going to try and like, okay, hope your air conditioner is set to recirculate?

We're going to evacuate the students.

As you're a perfectly vacuum-sealed vehicle.

Can you imagine it with Teslas with their panel?

Just a bunch of people getting sucked through their air conditioning.

Your cyber truck, you know.

Yeah,

you get bloated out to huge dimensions from the rapper.

Cyber socket.

Cyber socket.

I love that.

All right.

You got, you got it.

Hope your journey is less than three minutes, or you may lose some IQ points.

Oh, just stunning.

I love this.

I need to get this render.

I need to find it.

I love

it so much.

Remember to exhale as it depressurizes.

Oh, God.

Always gives me nightmares.

Oh, good grief.

Right.

Okay.

Let's go to

question mark logo.

Yeah.

Or DGW Hyperloop.

Founded in 2015, based in India, because India had to get involved in the grift.

Last real update, never.

And its current status is that it's a website.

Cool.

As with a lot of these, it's a website.

That's all it is.

And if we jump to the next one, which is

beautiful.

Hyperloops.

Fantastic.

So Hyperloop Patalia.

Hyperlopatalia.

So

we make it a pizza in the vacuum.

So

I have to talk about the fact.

Let's, firstly, Hyperloop Italia, right, founded in 2020 when a guy who we've already mentioned called Bebop Gresta probably did some legally, what I'm about to say is humorous conjecture,

some sort of shenanigans with his staff.

Probably, I don't know.

He's an annoying prick.

So the quite non-nefarious reasons could have been why he split off.

This thing doesn't exist.

Again, it's just a website, but we have to talk about the guy, Bebop Gresta.

Next slide, please.

Um, he looks kind of

like uh this is actually him.

Yes, this is actually him.

I thought this was like

image for like Italian dip shit.

Nope, this is Bebop Gresta.

You took Richard Hammond and stretched him.

Yes, oh, I was thinking, just if I was thinking if you rocket-fired a kilo of cocaine into Ed Norton

anyway, Bebop Gresta.

I've met this guy in person, he's a prick.

He wore a very large scarf.

Not that I necessarily hold that against people.

So brief story.

I once drove to Milton Keynes because I couldn't get down in a train in time.

I drove to Milton Keynes and on my way to Milton Keynes, by the way, for a Hyperloop conference that I intended to ask.

I was the only person asking searching questions there, so I'm glad I went.

On the way to this event, I was sideswiped by an HGV on a roundabout.

The story sounds like something I made up.

Roz, you made this up in a TF episode as a joke thing about a stupid place and a daft thing happening on an episode about Hyperloop.

And I was like, Roz, I haven't told you about this story.

Why are you regaling the precise thing that happened to me?

It was horrible.

Thankfully, I was in the smart car.

You were fucking mind-meld when we were going down the stairs at Two Liberty Place.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

We did spend a lot of time with each other running down the stairs of a literal skyscraper.

It's fine.

We'd had a lot of alcohol and everything was good.

So

yeah, this guy.

So hyper.

So thankfully, I was in the smart car and I literally bounced to safety as this HGV hit me and it just knocked the wing mirror off of the poor smart.

So fuck you, HGV driver.

I love that car.

Anyway, thankfully it survived to live until we got rid of it and got a panda instead.

That's a different story though.

Bebop Gresta.

So here he is.

Let's go to the next slide because we have to talk about the Hyperloop guys.

This is just me doing a Google search of Bebop Gresta.

And

this is why Hyperloop exists.

This is another reason why Hyperloop exists, which is to make this kind of guy have a book on it.

And for him to talk at the World Economic Forum.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I hate this guy.

And he was, so I asked him several searching questions to which he had no responses, obviously, because there's nothing in his head.

The thing is,

the most affable guest that we regularly have, like, all-round lovely man, and yet you are legit beefing with this guy, which is such an indictment of him.

I'm interested in the Hyperloop book, because like, what does it, what does it say?

It's like, page one, it didn't work.

What I learned about, you know, go fund me scams.

Honestly, I don't know how you could write.

I'm currently writing a book, spoiler,

about a legitimate thing.

And it's very hard to write multiple tens of thousands of words.

Writing a book about a thing that literally doesn't exist,

genuinely impressive, except that he probably got someone to ghost write his book about made-up stuff.

So wonderful.

Anyway, so I just, the Google search of him just shows all these pricks.

What's funny is, do you know the picture in the previous slide?

That's the picture on his website.

Oh, no.

He actively has decided to put that picture on his.

Oh, God.

Anyway, he's a spy.

He's a spy.

Bebop.com.

Bebop.com.

Bebop.com.

Oh, he's got a spot.

Yeah, to be fair.

Go into the Patreon, so we can get bebop.com.

Anyway, I figured the pictures, the Google search of his picture isn't just because I have personal beef with him, but it's because I think it sums up how much of a flim flam Hyperloop is, quite nicely.

Sort of modern-day Lyle Lanley.

Are we done done with this guy?

We're done with him.

Let's get rid of him.

Let's take him off our screen.

See you, Space Cowboy.

2015.

We're talking about

logoless Genesis Hyperloop.

2015, founded in the USA.

No real updates ever.

It didn't have a website and it's gone now.

Oh, I like this company.

There's like a

boutique.

There's like an actual Hyperloop working in someone's backyard.

The guy just, they only have a phone number.

It's like a load bar on where they only have Facebook pages.

It works like sort of software development where some guy has built a functional Hyperloop system just for his own amusement.

It works, and he's the only one who knows about it or uses it.

And it's called like Ron's Hyperloop, and Hyperloop is a misspell.

And this one actually works somehow.

Yeah,

exactly.

Kai runs his phone company on the side.

Yeah.

He he runs some of the last stretch limos in the in the us right uh next company please uh oh this one might be familiar to people

these motherfuckers

who got bored did too much ketamine allegedly and then bought a bunch of airsoft gun shells uh and like it's like a star cs something airsoft gun body put a little tiny bullshit flamethrower in it and sold those to the most soy-faced people imaginable incredible so what's funny about this is that it Boring Company was founded in 2017, based in the USA.

And in relation to its Hyperloop activities, its last real update was somehow in August 2013, because the Boring Company is one of Musk's weird things that he created.

Or

I don't actually know what the origin of the Boring Company is.

Is it actually a spin-off from SpaceX and Tesla, or is this something else he just

spin-off from SpaceX?

Because he thought maybe I can dig a tunnel under the property so I can get to work slightly more quickly.

That's the one.

So not a single thing this company has done

at all.

Basically, they've done nothing.

The boring company has done nothing in terms of Hyperloop, of course.

We're ignoring the flamethrowers and we're also ignoring the buried queue of Teslas.

I don't believe they've done anything substantial with increasing the speed of tunnel boring, which is supposed to be their big white whale.

Or is their big thing.

Yeah, exactly.

And keep in mind, it's not a flamethrower if it doesn't throw the flame, which requires napalm.

No, so it's just a flame.

It's just the

Bunsen burner on a stick.

Oh, okay.

It's a sideways Bunsen burner.

Yeah, understood.

Yeah, and I think, oh, actually, you've usefully nicked my next slide as well, which is good because the background to the person who's done a lot of good digging on the background to this and really dug into the specifics of not just like us being conspiratorial and saying, oh, Elon Musk did this to undermine California High Speed Rail, but no, Paris Marks, they have written

a superb, you know, just all-around fantastic person to follow and

keep up with in terms of tech stuff.

But Paris has written a really good blog digging into the detail of exactly what Musk was thinking when coming up with this stupid idea and why it was.

So

send everyone over to Disconnect and Paris Marx's blog.

They've written a really good piece on it.

Awesome podcast.

We should have them on the show sometime.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Actually, likewise, Rail Narrow should have had Paris on.

Sorry, Paris.

We'll pest you at some point.

Yeah, exactly.

And listeners, you'll be thankful that I'm now going to shut up.

Okay.

This is back to my own original part of the podcast.

Rather than

your rail problem, NASA.

Yes.

We do have to ask: okay, we've discussed Hyperloop as a grift.

All the companies are failing.

It's really funny.

Is there something that is a contrast to this where people are actually developing new technology in like a methodical, practical, serious way?

Well, you can make it look way more like a shoe, apparently.

Yes.

So I think the contrast here would be the Chuo Shin Conson in Japan, right?

Which it's, I know, I know Gareth has some criticisms of this thing, which we'll get to in a second.

But this is a superconducting maglev train that can go 300 and whatever miles an hour.

They've done literally 50 years of research and development to make this thing work, extensive testing on full-scale test tracks.

It's finally partially under construction, except for a weird bit in the middle where there's some NIMBY issues.

You know,

this is sort of an extremely expensive, extremely risky project that requires actual massive investment in horizontal construction.

This is not the guys in the shed sort of situation that Hyperloop companies are or aspire to be.

You know, if you're actually like, okay, we're going to build something that surpasses conventional rail, you're going to put some time into it and you're going to put a lot of money into it.

And even this thing has problems.

So, I mean,

the good thing about this, Ross, you're absolutely right.

This is kind of what this,

like, practically, Hyperloop might look like if it was a real thing, if it didn't have all the problems we talked about, because it has all the challenges of its linear infrastructure, it's horizontal infrastructure, exactly.

And even in this picture, you can see it's on stilts, which means it's had heavy infrastructure work done.

This is a massive civil engineering project.

The length of tunnels is spectacular.

It's already billions and billions of US dollars over budget.

It's a decade plus delayed.

It's likely that it's not going to open until the, it's supposed to be opening soon, but it's like, I'd be surprised if it is running before the, you know, before the 2030s, the mid-2030s.

It's slipping back.

But the reason, even if, you know, even if you park all that, it's a big complex infrastructure project.

The reason that Japan is progressing with this isn't because they're sick of conventional high-speed rail in any way.

It's that they've built out their high-speed rail system.

Like it's, they've built it out.

They've built as much as they kind of can.

And so the next thing has to kind of really be a bypass for the high-speed rail.

And so that's why they've put a punt on maglev.

That's that's kind of there's some early discussions about this.

Kind of, there's some logic behind this being more earthquake-proof than high-speed rail as well.

But the reality is, I don't think that stands up so much because the existing high-speed rail has shown itself to be pretty bomb-proof from an earthquake perspective.

This is just about providing a bypass for the bypass, and it goes through mostly just underground.

It's one huge, very, very expensive tunnel.

Yeah, and it's, you know, the trains are really big.

They're really, really fast.

You know, this is, it's very, very expensive to build.

And it's also four times more energy consuming than conventional high-speed rail per passenger seat.

And you got to have like liquid nitrogen cooling on the train because it's superconducting maglev.

It's a cool kind of little like prestige flex, though, to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, genuinely, given the capacity on the existing high-speed rail lines is A, massive, and B, maxed out, you do need something like this.

Yeah.

And the kind of question was: do we build another conventional

rail line?

We can just do the TGV thing and put another deck on all of the Shinky.

Well, the trouble is, this is, the thing is, they can't, because all the tunnels were built super early in the history of high-speed rail, which is why the trains, all the Japanese high-speed trains, have such stupid-looking noses.

I might have said this in a previous episode.

If I have hogs shout at me, I'm so sorry.

That was sort of part of the design philosophy as we have smaller windows and it's able to handle the differential pressure more easily.

They do have some double-decker Shinkansens, but they're phasing them out.

I think just because they got to put elevators on them, which is, you know, annoying.

And also, they run on a low-develop time system as well.

They run on a system that's almost like metro timetables, but for high-speed rails.

So they don't really have time to load up double deck of trains just like hurling myself into the train and then just sort of dealing oh they're beautiful though yeah i mean absolutely stunning yeah yeah yeah i mean all of the japanese trains okay apart from a couple of duck ducky duds the majority of the japanese high-speed fleet is stunning it's interesting that this thing isn't as high capacity the trains are not nearly as high capacity as the um mainline you know conventional rail equivalents they they don't carry as many people there's a lot more kit on the train than a conventional high-speed rail train as well so there are definitely shortcomings This is a technology that has shortcomings compared to conventional high-speed rail.

But, yeah, as Ross says, it was kind of like, well, we're kind of playing around on top of an existing, fully saturated, very effective high-speed rail system.

So, what the hell?

There's a couple areas where they may have shot themselves in the foot.

Like, you know, this thing is because it's superconducting magnets, there's all these intense magnetic fields around it, which means in these weird shielded boarding corridors.

And, like, also, they may be implementing credit cards.

Yeah, there may be like some kind of extra security about boarding it because everyone loves to have security on trains these days.

Sort of negates the whole you know, the advantage over airports.

Show me the Shinkansen SWAT team.

Hold on, I'm going to Google this really quickly.

Google it or put it into Bing AI or whatever.

Yeah, it may not even be that much faster than the

Nozami Shinkansen to go from Tokyo to Nagoya.

It probably won't be really worth it until it gets to Osaka.

And that's going to be a long time from now.

But yeah, we're talking the 2040s at the earliest, like the late 2040s.

So I've looked this up.

I've looked this up and I'm going to save this image for Devon so they can phase it in.

I'm going to put a link

in the Zencaster chat here.

So JR East did a terrorist attack drill, I guess.

And this is their police unit.

It is four guys,

all of whom are in just regular cop uniforms.

And one of them has my favorite piece in a piece of police equipment in the world, the Grabby Pole.

Where never I thought, so initially I thought that was like a comedy cartoon fishing net.

Yeah, no, it should also be quite funny.

This is literally, there's quite a dark history to it because they were, I believe, invented in China in order to like restrain and put out people who are setting themselves on fire to protest against the Chinese government.

But yeah, the deal is that you just like, if a guy has a knife or something or he's, you know, he wants to fight you, you just grab him with the pole and pin him against something and then just wait until he chills out, or you can get him on the floor.

Like,

uh, dark, but also kind of funny in a dark way.

Um, yeah, but this is you know, this is this is what it looks like when you're developing this new kind of high-capacity rail technology.

When this is finished in 20 years, they'll probably have worked even more of the bugs out.

We might have a room-temperature superconductor by then, and they can get rid of the liquid nitrogen system.

Who knows?

But yeah, exactly.

This is if you're actually trying to build something new this is the level of development you need um now

what has resulted from hyperloop being the technology of the future um

oh even though it didn't work um i mean

it has given an excuse to kill a lot of high-speed rail projects yeah not not the main excuse but one of them

fear uncertainty and doubts i remember watching your original loop video which uh continues to be an inspiration to me because it's very very good And yeah,

even if it hasn't directly stopped or slowed down projects,

it's contributed.

Alice is sending us more pictures of treasures.

I get into the cop hole.

It just happens to me.

There's nothing going on.

We can definitely send you this one.

You can flash it up as well.

It might not have been a singular reason, but it has contributed.

I'm making myself sad thinking about HS2 again.

It's contributed to this wider feeling of, oh, well, maybe, you know, it's added to, you know,

along with like the Green Party of England and Wales and the IEA and TPA and also Rishi Sunak going, hi, guys, I'm getting a job application for California.

Along with all this stuff, it's

much like your mate, Dave.

He just wants to work in California.

Everybody wants to get

out of Britain and like work in California with a son.

Yeah, and then you realize you're in the bankers field.

Yeah.

I think that's just punishment for Rishi Sunak.

I think we should install him in Chino, you know?

there are a few places I'd like to install Sunak yeah

um

on some train tracks might be a good start um in Minecraft parody uh redacted etc those like redstone train tracks yeah on some exact train tracks yeah um so yeah it's it's it's contributed to this this weird pullback from high spad rail that we've seen uh you know in the usa the i i think it's fair to say cal uh california heist pedrail has sort of been kind of stalling and tripping over its shoelaces, even though big sections of it are still being built.

And obviously, in the UK, we've just

smashed our face into a brick wall and got rid of all the important parts of HS2.

Yeah, I mean, it's not even going to go to Houston now, apparently, which, my God,

yeah.

I mean, it's funny because anyway, that's another episode, isn't it?

But at some point, you'll do the HS2 episode and you'll find, and if I'm still alive,

we can go there.

That one will be about

25 hours long.

Yeah,

we'll start recording it in the.

anyway.

Yeah,

that's one we have to do as a live episode, I think.

And then that way that'll keep us

hard and fast.

You guys do not go anywhere.

Come to London.

We'll do an HS episode with Gareth live.

Oh, yeah, that'd be it.

It's a threat.

Yeah, we could

notice, you know, live from the National Railway Museum.

Oh, that'd be fun.

Oh, shit.

We could go there.

I mean, that would actually be an awesome idea.

We should maybe take this one offline.

That's a very good idea.

Anyway,

Hogs, you're on notice for that one.

Anyway, broadcasting from the the cab of the mallard.

I would prefer

Halaton, to be honest.

It's my little heresy.

Oh, yeah.

I prefer

the Q1, actually, because I'm a maniac and I like ugly things.

But anyway, that's another story.

Explains why you keep coming on the podcast, you know?

Yeah, I mean,

this is a situation where, you know, it's another one of those miracle technologies that's just around the corner that maybe if we just wait for it to show up, we can not invest all the money.

You know, it's up there.

Hyperloop is up there with like carbon capture and storage and like

driverless cars.

Driverless cars.

Through generative artificial intelligence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Battery freight locomotives.

Room temperature superconductor.

Room temperature superconductors.

We've had fused a couple of times.

Nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fission might be

moving along a little bit.

We will sound like idiots on, but like, all of the rest of them are just.

Let's list all technologies right now and see which ones can be cancelled.

Screwdriver.

Not real.

Whoa, crap.

That machine that cuts plastic in fun shapes.

Ooh.

3D printing.

Laser cutter.

Yeah, that's fucking bullshit.

The laser cutter, it's taking investment away from people with scissors and stuff.

Oh, I love a Silver Sanders.

Can't be done.

Electric screwdriver.

The Makita battery-powered coffee machine that James Hoffman did a video on.

Oh, man.

Yes.

Like the guy.

Really, really sexy voice.

Yeah.

So,

but, you know, we still keep throwing money at this.

Here's another one I stole from Gareth.

Hooray.

Yeah, I taught it up just from what I could find.

I taught it up how much money the EU has given Hyperloop shit.

And that's 54 million Euros.

Pocket change.

You know, it loses that down the back of the sofa.

I will say, yeah, you know, we're also still trying to fund it in the United states um

according to news five abc news five in cleveland um they're still trying to do the hyperloop transportation technologies test track in uh

like cleveland okay oh my god i mean they're not though are they it's just the same journalists repeating the same credulous bullshit yeah look oh wait this is january 31st 2023 excuse me i forgot that the year changed

also that it's not january 31st yet

incredible well it could have been um it might be when this goes out.

Yeah, just baffling.

And this is one of the things that's incumbent on us, right?

And I don't know we're going to get to the point of what have we learned here.

One of the things that is incumbent on us is if we can, particularly for local journalists who are writing about this shit, kind of reach out to them and say,

do you want some more content to put into your content farm?

Why don't you have a conversation with me and I'll explain why this doesn't work?

And that's kind of what I did.

And it has, so I have converted the whole BBC tech team into anti-Hyperloop people through partly through Rory Keflan-Jones actually being quite a good tech journalist and seeing through this bullshit immediately, and partly through me being very annoying on Twitter.

All right, I gotta drop off.

All right, no, we did almost

no worries.

Talk to you guys later.

We love you.

Love you too.

Bye, Liam.

Bye.

Bye.

Oh, we, I, I, see, but

time pressure.

Yeah, we were so close.

We were so close.

Anyway, right.

Yeah.

If you can find a journalist, find yourself a pet journalist and convert them against Hyperloop.

That's my call.

Yeah.

Put a a collar on a journalist you know yeah like a trainer journalist and i guess another question is does this vac train technology have a future you and i disagree on this ross because you kind of think maybe in the distant future it doesn't yeah distant future 100 years from now i think you know eventually okay you're gonna build a 10 000 mile an hour transatlantic tunnel you it's just the logical thing to do long time we don't have enough materials on this planet to do that that's some like asteroid mining or something yeah we have to to do astronaut, we have to get asteroid mining down.

There's a load of large increasingly large dominoes required before we get to this point.

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, you do it at some point, I think.

But you know, all of that shit, why do we want to get around Earth that fast?

And also, why wouldn't we just be doing like suborbital bullshit?

You know,

yeah, I think those are fun.

My inclination is that for those longer distances, you're still, from a resource perspective and an energy perspective, gonna just you're gonna end up creating kind of um uh artificial fuels for kind of regular ass jet aircraft.

Oh, yeah, that's the other thing.

You wind up with dial fuels and stuff like that.

That's another huge like technology, like money pit is synthetic fuels.

It is, and it is large amounts of bullshit.

But I reckon it's closer to reality that we do that.

Much like the room temperature superconductor, it's one of those things where it's almost all bullshit.

But if someone does it, we can just kind of dust our hands and figure out all the things we fucked up.

Doesn't matter.

Solve them.

Bost it.

Easy.

I think, yeah, if you if you figure out like something, like if you figure out like fusion power and then you can you know you you you develop processes that just use a shitload of energy but can otherwise extract like iron from dirt or whatever you know maybe you can make this work but that's a long time from now or we're talking distant future not immediate future

I suppose part of the, and this people challenge me on like when I say very strongly and asserted that the driverless cars will never exist.

They say, well, the technology is moving on in leaps and bounds.

And sure, will.

And I go, yeah, but have you noticed like there's a bigger world out there?

I suppose I think the way that our civilization exists and functions is going to change so radically by the end of this century that we're just not going to be thinking about this stuff for a couple of centuries afterwards.

Not even to be a pessimist about it, but well, if you wanted to be a pessimist about it, you could be like, this is like a Mayan guy in sort of like 1500 being like, listen, our calendar technology is getting better and better and better.

It's like, okay, sure, but like, that that doesn't really make us more resilient against the sort of existential threats that might make it irrelevant.

I don't know.

The Mayans are more resilient than the Aztecs and the Incans.

They're still around.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

So you get to the point where,

even if you don't go full pessimist,

we're going to have to pay so much attention to resource management

that this stuff is going to, we're going to be kicking this novel technology stuff way back into the long grass.

Um, uh, it requires a huge amount of investment, which there's a lot of money flying around, but like it in a very sort of undirected way

and fundamentally like wasteful way.

And what I'm saying at this point is, of course, to bring back an old favorite, Climate Stalin.

Um,

you know, you gotta, you gotta, I mean, if you reorient, if you reorient the economy so there's not one lever that's instant in uh interest late rates,

You might have more useful investment of money into infrastructure.

Climate Stalin.

But we don't have that.

Climate Stalin.

I don't know why I said it like that.

Climate.

Stalin.

Climate Stalin.

Climate Stalin.

What if it was Climate Trotsky?

Interesting, but then it gets ice picked in the back of the head by the climate.

I don't think that would work.

Yeah.

So, yeah,

this is not technology that you should be necessarily pursuing now, particularly not in the form of Hyperloop.

Build regular high-speed rail.

And we're going to have, you know, airliners for a long time.

Yeah, they remain, frankly, they remain for long-distance flights,

don't get me wrong, they're carbon horrific, but they remain the most resource-efficient way of moving those long distances because the carbon that you'd need to invest, you know, the carbon emissions from building across the Atlantic tunnel, if you ignore the fact there's not enough steel

on a sailing ship.

I don't care if it takes three weeks.

Like, just fucking.

nuclear shipping.

Nuclear shipping is.

Well, I believe the Chinese are working on a nuclear container ship right now.

Yeah.

Genuinely based.

Yes.

But,

you know, we'd like to see some more conventional high-speed rail.

Then you can worry about very, very fast trains that go arbitrary distances at arbitrary speeds.

But for the most part, this has just been a large amount of kind of like bullshit that has sunk money and time into it.

Yes.

Attention.

Yes.

Another crucial resource of which we have stolen almost three hours of yours.

Yes, exactly.

Leave him late for an evening date.

You know, just what did we learn?

I guess we learned not to do it again.

Like,

don't drive to Milton Keynes.

Yeah.

Drive to Milton Keynes.

Exercise some control of your finances, European Union.

God damn.

Yeah.

So send a guy out there to look at the pipe because however much, even if you like fly him out first class, it's going to cost less money for him to go out there, look at the pipe, be like, this is bullshit, pay him a living wage and like an executive level salary to write a report saying the pipe is bullshit.

And then you don't give them the money than you just gave them without doing any of that.

I mean, you are literally right.

The theme there is employ better government advisors.

Universal bureaucratic income.

Eventually, everyone will work for the EU

at some level, and we will go around inspecting each other, and everything's going to be fine.

You know, you got to move.

What we'll do after the room temperature superconductor, move engineering in-house.

Yes.

Be more like Japan, but not in any of the bad ways.

Put me out of work.

In-source all engineering functions.

Seriously.

Be like Chinatown buses.

Build the Port Authority bus terminal and pave the earth.

Yes.

Be like Dave and move to California to work on high-speed rail.

Don't move to Bakersfield.

Well,

we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with Danger.

Hello, Liam, Roz, Alice, and guest.

Oh, Liam.

Liam has gone slightly wrong.

Lastly, in an unexpected way.

Yeah.

This story occurred while I worked for a retail printing company that was shortly thereafter acquired and is today a national retail chain of printing and shipping offices.

Image attached.

Okay.

Nobody has a printer anymore.

Yeah.

I used to work in a print shop.

Yes, exactly.

As it is with many companies, shortly before they are gobbled up, the best days were in the rear of your mirror.

Staffing was inadequate.

Training was haphazard.

Safety was truly an afterthought, and equipment was put to the limits of its usefulness rather than being maintained and repaired when damaged.

You know, I used to work for an engineering office that did not have its own plotter.

I had to walk down the street to the printing office to get everything printed.

It was a fucking hassle, especially since AutoCAD never gets the print right the first time.

No, it really never does.

It always ends up...

Oh, fucking hell.

No, it's not.

That's why I use MicroStation.

Even MicroStation can't get it right.

I got annoyed once when

I worked for Atkins and they had a machine that folded drawings for me, which if you're a track engineer, it's very useful because our drawings are fucking way too long.

Right.

Like, I moved to another company and they didn't have it.

You had to fold your own drawings like an animal.

Shocking.

I hated it.

You know,

the problem when you work at a small, tiny little engineering firm that does not have its own plotter is that

if you screw up the print and you bring it back and you look at it, then

not only are you mad at AutoCAD, but then your boss is mad at you for wasting money.

I was like, no, it's the software.

It's the software that does this.

It's totally unpredictable.

Have a job code for that.

Fucked drawings.

Fucked drawings.

It's nobody's fault except AutoCADs.

They should pay us to use that software.

Exactly.

At our site, we had a large number of 1990s-era rolling cabinets between six and ten feet long.

Ooh, those are so dangerous.

And the most notable feature of these as fit their age was the doors.

They were failing.

The cabinet located right next to our drill press had one door fully removed.

It was not repaired, replaced, or discarded as those involved doing something.

Capital D, capital S.

Everybody's job, and nobody does it.

Instead, it was simply leaned against the side with jagged, torn metal hinges sticking straight out.

Cool.

I mentioned the lack of maintenance.

This was a common issue under the longtime shop manager, the DeBoss.

Fortuitous naming there.

Yeah.

To be fair to the guy.

Yeah.

To be fair to the guy, I learned more from DeBoss about dealing with the public, customer service, and how to work quickly and efficiently under pressure than anyone else in my life.

But to paraphrase Walt Whitman, DeBoss was large and contained multitudes.

Uh-oh.

First, we don't like multitudes.

Damn with multitudes.

First, DeBoss was right about everything and refused to accept he was mistaken about anything.

Yeah, you can't have any kind of management tyranny position that allows you to do that.

Yes.

This was a problem given that he was a real weirdo.

He once brought up...

Well, let's not start throwing stones here.

He once brought up in casual conversation that not only was the moon landing fake, it was impossible.

due to radiation from the Van Allen belt.

Oh, dear.

What followed was an hour-long shouting argument argument between us, after which we didn't speak for a week.

That's really funny.

You just go in the print shop with your like AutoCAD drawing to get your AutoCAD thing printed, and it's two guys yelling at each other, but you don't know shit about the fucking Van Allen belt.

Honestly, honestly, from the times I went into that print shop in Media, Pennsylvania,

they had nothing else to do most of the time.

I imagine it must have happened more often than you would think.

In Media, Pennsylvania, Lassen for in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Yes.

It's not in the middle of Pennsylvania.

It's in southeast Pennsylvania.

Fuck.

Alex.

Maybe it was in the middle at one point.

It's like N Media, Pennsylvania, but like in the same way as N Media Race, you know, like you walk in on the Van Allen Belt thing.

Yeah.

The boss believed that allergies and asthma were fake and mocked sufferers of both.

Okay.

Asthma?

Yeah, that's fake.

He was also certain that the cigarettes he smoked openly on the production floor were good for him.

They finally invented it.

They invented it.

Yeah.

The boss was also ex-army and fond of things like bypassing safety features.

All of his tracks now.

Yeah.

Bypassing safety features on equipment like laminators or printers and working through being tired, sick, or injured.

Which brings us to the incident.

We got to get out of this culturally.

You know, don't fucking kuroshi yourself.

It's better for everyone, including you and the productivity of the organization, for you to take the time off when you're sick.

Yes.

Yes, it is.

Absolutely.

I mentioned the drill press.

For those not in printing, a print shop uses a drill press to drill holes in documents.

Most commonly, this is three holes for inserting into a binder.

But there are less common but still used other arrangements.

I was changing out the bits for the drill press when I fumbled one and it fell into the dark space between the press, the nearby cabinet, and a broken door which jutted out a sharp bent metal hinge on which, while reaching for the drill bit, I proceeded to tear a sharp six-inch plus long gash into my forearm.

Oh, I don't like that.

Yep.

I yelped and I said, I gotta go.

I immediately ran to our first aid kit and realized quickly a couple gauze pads were not going to cut it, and I needed medical attention.

Yeah, that's going to be like a suturing situation.

The boss had other ideas and proceeded to explain loudly on the production floor, in earshot of customers and coworkers, that, one, I was being a pussy, I guess, by bleeding so much.

Uh-huh.

I mean, I suppose that might be accurate.

Yeah, well, well, were he being a pussy?

Like,

we can't know.

Yeah.

Two, I would be fine if I went outside and, quote, rub some dirt on it.

Promotion.

I don't do that

one.

That's probably

avoid tadness.

Three, those prints I were working on were not going to drill themselves.

I let him say his piece and told him I was going.

I let him say his piece and I told him I was going to a clinic, drove 20 minutes to the company-approved medical office, and several dozen or so stitches later, I was good as new.

Ouch.

I wish I could say.

That's a bad cut if you needed that many stitches.

That's a lot of stitches, yeah.

Trikey.

I wish I could say the store had a renewed focus on safety, but later that year, another co-worker almost strangled himself by getting his tie caught in the roll laminator, which had its safety guard bypassed with a ballpoint pen.

Oh, God.

Don't laminate your co-worker.

Because it was easier to change the role that way.

The boss left a year or two later due to differences in management philosophy with our new owners.

The boss did whatever the fuck he wanted when he wanted to.

I didn't sort of look well on my stripes.

There'll be no more after me sort of moment here.

Yeah, a bygone age

of American management tyranny.

Yes.

Yeah, he's sort of a management Ronin.

Yeah, basically, yeah.

Like we've done the sword hunt, and now the management samurai are bureaucrats.

Yeah.

He opened an independent coffee shop six months later, stole half the major customers, and then went out of business after a year.

I am saluting right now.

He really did become a Ronin.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he did a murder-suicide pact.

Thanks to you guys for the great content.

And to all listeners, printing is still good.

Trees will be here forever.

Trash isn't real.

Oh, makes sense.

Yeah.

That was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have commercials before we go?

It's called Rail Natter, and you can find it on YouTube.

It's really good.

I've been on it.

We have.

I've been on it too.

And we presented half of an episode of it today.

Yeah.

But the other half is Gareth's.

If you've enjoyed this episode, you've already half enjoyed Rail Natter.

So go on.

Exactly.

Round up.

Exactly.

You got to go to Rail Natter on YouTube.

And only half the episodes are easy to find.

Because some of them are live streams.

Then you got to go on the channel and look.

Oh, it's very irritating.

Yeah, I know.

I'm so sorry, everyone.

And most of them are live live streams, so it's actually really hard.

It's very difficult to find the podcast.

I wouldn't recommend you to avoid it.

Yeah, that's it.

No, Alice was on and made me buy this watch that I'm wearing right now.

Oh, the Monday, which is a nice Monday.

Yeah, yeah.

I think I've told you that before.

It was a fun episode.

We talked about watches and time.

It was fab.

That was ages ago now.

I've done bloody 202 of those as of tonight.

Amazing.

202 episodes.

Every single week I've done an episode since I started it.

Insane.

What an idiot.

I finally got my mundane back.

This is the thing.

It's the one train watch, you know?

Yeah, yeah, and we all have mundane watches now.

Because you have very nice watches for like ball engineer or train master.

Yeah, right.

Subscribe to subscribe to the Patreon.

Subscribe to Gower, the Patreon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

No, yeah, railway.

Enough people subscribe to the Patreon.

We can all buy nicer watches and then build HS2.

Exactly.

Everyone, yeah, if we could, we do need to, I mean, we said that last time, didn't we?

We do need to, um, we do need to get the Patreon on just buy, just like Guerrilla buy, uh, gorilla build HS2.

No, I, I, I have, I have plugs, which are, um, uh, listen to uh, Kill James Bond and Trash Future, but Kill James Bond in particular, because oh my god, I'm, I know, so you got, I have a thing I told myself when I was shopping in Sainsbury's that if I was going to appear on an episode, I would tell you, which is

that I'm loving your Eurospy stuff, even though you guys are getting sick of doing them.

They are so fun to listen to, they're honestly such good, it's so much fun.

Thank you so much.

So, everyone should listen to Kill James Bond.

It's brilliant.

It's getting me through as

I have it as my weekly shop listening.

So, I go around Saints Breeze with my nice earphones and listen to that.

It's lovely.

I had a funny from the Zardaz episode I thought of, and I've forgotten what it was.

Oh, that episode is so.

I mean, also, that film, I just did not expect what ended up, I didn't expect it to become good.

I was like, this is going to be funny crap.

And it was ended up being like a seriously, profoundly interesting sounding film.

Yeah, that was a good episode.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm liking this sort of new ending of the show.

We just praise me for 10 minutes.

This is the mutual admiration society.

Thank you.

So do both of you, you know.

And also, Liam's not here.

Liam, you're not here, and you probably won't listen to this because we're three hours in.

But I love you so much.

You look so beautiful at your wedding.

It was lovely.

Liam, it was, it was, so there we go.

So there's some Liam love that Liam won't listen to

because he's uh it's not gonna listen to three hours of episode.

Who, who, who, who listens to the podcasts that they record themselves?

Oh, not me.

I start like, I start listening back and I start realizing when I've the glottal stops have slipped back into my accent.

Uh,

we did the KJV episode on the spy in the green hat, and I developed a new complex about the way in which I say hat when I'm not thinking about it, which is just hat

hat, the hat, the spy in the green hat.

Yeah,

the glottal stops quite.

Yeah.

It's South London, yeah.

Here's the thing.

South London.

Here's the thing to think about this episode, though.

Although it took three hours, we got through slides at twice the rate we usually do.

Incredible.

Guarantee some kind of catalyst for this.

The rail nat away is 400 slides in 40 minutes.

Blank speed, you know?

Anyway,

I'll stop saying things.

I love you all.

I love coming on.

Listeners, I love you all too.

I'm in a happy mood.

I'm also very sleep-deprived because of baby reasons.

I have a child,

all right.

Well, in that case, what we should say is, well, that was a podcast.

It was.

Thanks for coming.

Yes, uh, bye, everyone.

Thanks, everyone.

Bye.