[ozonehole]

After doing some searching, I was surprised to find that there hasn't been any discussion yet on this forum about the old French aerotrain. This is basically a hovercraft train, and we're talking late 1960's early '70's technology. From what I understand, it was very energy efficient and inexpensive. Heaps less expensive than maglevs. But once the maglevs were invented, the aerotrain was abandoned. The aerotrain reached a maximum speed of 428 km/hr before it was scrapped. True, the old aerotrain ran on oil, but it just as well could have been made electric, using a propellor rather than a jet engine (such a train was made - it preceded the jet engine model).

http://www.shonner.com/aerotrain/history.htm



More photos & info:
http://aernav.free.fr/Index.html

Hovercraft ferries have also kind of died out. A shame really - I've been on them, and they're good.



The relevancy of all this to peak oil is that this technology would be energy saving if compared to conventional train and air travel. That's especially so if you powered it on electricity (hard to do with the boats, but easy enough with the trains), and the electricity came from a source like nuclear (or maybe wind?).

[Devil]

The hovercraft was horrendously fuel-greedy, which is why it is disappearing for cross-channel use. Smaller versions are ideal for wetland transport, though.

Of the energy-saving concepts, SwissMetro http://www.swissmetro.com/en/00_Home/index_E.htm is very interesting: 500 km/h at <½ the electricity consumption of a TGV at half the speed, per passenger. I believe that, after 25 years of study and research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, the Swiss Government has given the nod on a test project of ~25 km, single tunnel. Will take ~ 10 years. If successful, the first full-scale line will be Geneva-Lausanne, twin tunnel, then Lausanne-Berne and Berne-Zurich. Geneva airport-Zurich airport will be ~45 min, with 2 intermediate stops (currently, an Intercity train, over the same route, takes over 3½ hours).

[tita]

Swissmetro is a nice idea. Recently (2004), a prototype was created at an 1:10 scale, to validate the first numerical simulations. Thereafter, the project was temporary stalled for "political reasons" (research costs). New simulations were made, and now, they are looking for foreign investors to build the test project.

But there is actually no full-scale prototype. There's a lot of people who classify this project as a fantasy. And they are right. The project rely mostly on simulations, and the practical constraints (especially in the building) are too fuzzy. As our president in communications and transportations stated, "When I see that it requires twelve years or even more to build some miles of tunnel acrosse the Gothard, and when I think about the security problems, I can't see how we are to solve all the problems that poses swissmetro".

And again, it is a project in the view of a growing world. As soon as the world will be getting slower, the need to travel at super-speed will become trivial. Trains are good enough to transport goods and people, and the network is already there (at least for switzerland and Japan, and, not so good, in rest of Europe)

[Devil]

No, I don't believe this project is a fantasy: it is very do-able. It is unfair to compare the Gotthard tunnel through a large lump of rock with the SwissMetro tunnel, which is essentially a sub-surface tunnel, similar to the 27 km LEP tunnel across the French/Swiss border for the CERN experiments. This is also the same technique successfully used in Lausanne for the stretch of the Lausanne-Echallens-Bercher railway between Chauderon and Flon (granted it disrupted traffic around Bel-Air for a couple of years).

I agree that a full-scale prototype has not yet been built. And the simulations have been on-going for decades and were fully confirmed by the practical scale model. This is not just a recent idea to suddenly confront a new problem. Sure, 25 years ago, many said it couldn't be done. Today, the majority of experts agree that it is do-able.

The main advantage is that the energy required for transporting passengers is a fraction of that of any other method that I know of. Why? Because there is little wind resistance and no friction. The speed is almost an accidental side-effect.

I would dearly love this island to have the guts to propose a SwissMetro joining Nicosia to Larnaca to Limassol to Paphos. We very badly need a good public transport system here and the distance between the towns is just right for it. Furthermore, there is only region along this line where the geology may render a surface tunnel a little difficult to construct, for about 10 km, some 20 km west of Limassol. However, this is a pipedream; Cypriots are not noted to be courageous in their technological decisions.

[Dezakin]

Look up inductrack for an inexpensive-ish maglev that would be similar in effect and probably cheaper.

[Devil]

Not similar. The beauty of SwissMetro is that it requires very little energy to run it, because there is almost no air resistance. I agree that Inductrack would be cheaper in capital costs but much higher in running costs because of all the air that has to be displaced. The object in this forum is to promote energy conservation inter alia.

[Dezakin]

Sorry, I was comparing to the original aerotrain concept promoted.

While I find the evacuated tube train much more elegant and energy efficient, I'm not sure that its realistic to assume that conventional rail will soon be displaced by inductrack let alone by the swissmetro concept.

Eventually maybe, but further out than my crystal ball can see.