InnoTrans 2024 report (28)

The Hyperloop idea still finds its supporters and entities that try to keep it alive. As at InnoTrans 2022, it was also present in Berlin in 2024 with a project by the Technische Universität München (TUM, Technical University of Munich), which has been developing it for several years. In 2023, the research team managed to carry out a test run with a crew in vacuum conditions, and shortly before that, a new test track was opened in Ottobrunn (on the southern outskirts of München), which received TÜV certification for passenger transport and allows testing on a 1:1 scale. At InnoTrans 2024, the university exhibited its current demonstration vehicle, which was previously on display at the IAA 2023 show.

The wave of enthusiasm for this idea has already subsided when not only the project for its real application was completed. In particular, the initiative that was one of the main promoters of the whole idea from a global perspective and thus a certain reference for it has ended: at the end of 2023, the Californian company Hyperloop One ceased operations, terminated employment and sold off its assets, and its intellectual property was transferred to the majority shareholder, the logistics group DP World Logistics from the United Arab Emirates.

Establishment of Hyperloop One in 2014 was preceded by the initiative of Elon Musk, who presented the vision of the system in 2013. According to his theory, aerodynamic aluminum “capsules” with passengers or cargo could move in a tube (guided on pylons above the ground or buried underground) in a vacuum at speeds of up to 1,223 km/h. However, Musk only presented this vision, stating that he did not have the capacity to further advance it to real commercial use, and left this to others.

In 2014, Hyperloop Technologies was founded, renamed Hyperloop One in 2016, and then Virgin Hyperloop One in 2017 after Richard Branson took over a significant stake, who carries out his activities through the Virgin Group and companies with this name, including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Galactic, and the former Virgin Trains.

(Virgin) Hyperloop One has gradually raised around 450 million USD to finance its operations, mainly from DP World Logistics and Richard Branson. It entered the market with strong ambitions and a bold vision of deploying the system worldwide. It built a test track in Nevada, but during the first and only test with human passengers in 2020, the module reached a maximum speed of only 160 km/h...

In 2022, Virgin Hyperloop One decided to continue its progress only in freight transport, which led to Richard Branson leaving the initiative, as his intention was to transport people. The name was changed back to Hyperloop One and DP World Logistics became the majority owner. A year later, the aforementioned complete end of the company followed, when it failed to attract any interest in establishing the system in commercial conditions.

Hyper-Miracle? Or Hypeloop?

The very essence of the entire system seems very tempting at first glance, of course, because the transportation of people and goods at speeds exceeding the values of conventional air transport and in space-saving conditions would mean a literal revolution not only in transport, but in all areas of human society in which mobility plays a role. However, a more detailed analysis from the perspective of physical laws and technological circumstances puts this idea on the same level as dreaming about the possibility of human teleportation, at least given the current state of technical progress and discoveries made so far.

After all, already in 2020 we brought an extensive analysis setting this entire mistake straight - here and here, which could have served to clarify the unreality of Musk's idea. However, complex analyses full of formulas and physics are more tiring for many dreamers. This also applies to managers, investors, grant agencies or followers and applauding users of all kinds of social networks (especially if they themselves live well from it and shake hands with politicians around the world).

In the first years after the launch of the hyperloop boom, a number of renowned transport companies (like DB, SBB, SNCF and many others) also caught on to this wave. For example, at InnoTrans 2018, DB presented its cooperation with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) on the “Innovation Train” project, although it was generally intended as a test platform for the implementation of advanced technologies inspired, among others, by the hyperloop concept into existing railway systems.

Five years later, DB itself included the hyperloop among the themes of the exhibition “FUTURAILS: Railway Utopias of Three Centuries”, which took place in 2023 in the Nuremberg Museum and focused on technologies that had the ambition to replace conventional rail transport and the reasons why this did not happen. The exhibition was briefly formulated in a press release by the DB Foundation as “the entire spectrum from curious visions from the beginnings of the railway to current concepts such as the Hyperloop from the Technical University of Munich and the magnetic railway of Max Bögl.”

Hamburger Hafen und Logistik (HHLA), the owner and manager of the Hamburg port complex, announced the creation of a joint venture also with HTT in December 2018. In July 2021, it presented the HyperPort concept. However, in 2022, the decision was made to end the project, HHLA withdrew its brand from it and sold its stake to Virgin Hyperloop One, so there is no need to comment on this further...

Despite all this, there are still other followers of this idea and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is looking for other partners. In Toulouse, it operated a research and development center with a test track - this project was finished in 2023 and the test facility dismantled. In Brazil, the HyperPort project is being developed with its participation, and in Italy it is a technology partner in the Hyper Transfer joint venture, which aims to build a hyperloop system on the Mestre - Padua route. The project is being implemented in cooperation with Italian companies Webuild, Leonardo, Hyperloop Italia and RINA.

Nevomo

One of the permanent successors of the idea and now probably the most active in the media is the Polish company Nevomo, or rather a group of companies based in Poland (Nevomo LM and Nevomo IoT) and partially registered in Switzerland (Nevomo Group and Nevomo Capital).

Its CargoTube project, announced in April 2024 in cooperation with the German Institute of Hyperloop Technology (IHT), founded in 2021 at the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer, is based on the development of the hyperloop idea. However, Nevomo is working more intensively on the MagRail project, which actually has nothing to do with the original idea of the hyperloop - the movement of capsules in a closed space and conditions approaching vacuum - and is a certain compromise, but still visionary.

This is an attempt to implement magnetic levitation technology in standard railway conditions: the stators of a linear motor would be installed in the railway superstructure and the developed rotors of linear motors in the wagons. Compared to the hyperloop, this is a noticeable step down from a futuristic dream, but in the reality of the railway world it is still a utopia beyond the scope of financial, technological, legislative or regulatory possibilities.

If almost every saved kilogram of own weight and centimeter of vehicle length is important for the economy of rail freight transport in the European environment, if the introduction of ETCS brings significant protests from operators due to interference in the economy of the entire sector and the idea of DAC causes a huge wave of resistance due to costs, if vehicle approval is an extremely complicated and long-term matter, then it is difficult to imagine that MagRail would succeed in this environment.

It is nice to see on the Nevomo video how the wagons move around the station and enter the depot or repair shop on their own, but the costs of this activity are so great that they do not make economic sense. And most importantly, the railway needs bulky mass transport in long trains and not the moving of individual wagons, which is not financially viable. In addition, this results in inefficient use of the capacity of the infrastructure.

In this respect, trucks are much more advantageous, and this fact has already been confirmed, for example, by the concept of short CargoSprinter diesel units from Windhoff (Class 690) and Talbot (Class 691) manufactured in 1996 - 97, which were tested by DB, but were eventually taken out of service in 2000... The CargoMover system, a self-propelled wagon developed by Siemens Transportation and exhibited at InnoTrans 2022, also had a similar outcome.

The parameter of the largest possible transport capacity also applies to passenger rail transport, for which it is always more economically advantageous to transport large numbers of people than small ones. The same can be applied to both the Hyperloop "capsule" and short regional trains. And after all, the Schienenzeppelin (rail zeppelin), an experimental railcar which resembled a Zeppelin airship in appearance and was designed and developed by the German aircraft engineer Franz Kruckenberg in 1929, also hinted at this.

It also makes no sense to install a magnetic levitation system on a railway line, as each system limits the other: conventional trains would limit the speed of magnetic levitation trains, and faster magnetic levitation trains would disrupt the schedules and routes of conventional trains. Besides, one can imagine how difficult it would be to get such a combined system approved. Let's wait and see how long it will take for this idea to reach the same practical result as Hyperloop...