Swiss engineering Master’s student has designed a subaquatic train that would travel at 500 kilometres an hour and would link Lausanne and Geneva in ten minutes. The idea of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop was improvised for a train that will levitate on magnets under water.
The design of the unbelievable train was inspired by the scrapped Swissmetro project in the early 2000s, which had envisioned a similar high-speed link between the two major Swiss cities, albeit underground, not under water. The United Arab Emirates is also planning to build a Hyperloop for cargo, and after 2017 Elon Musk’s California project, Elia Notari, a Master’s student at the Civil Engineering Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), decided to realize another project. His underwater train can link cities of Geneva and Lausanne via water train in Lake Geneva.
“I designed my project so that the structure can even withstand severe flooding,”
Notari explained while his professor Aurelio Muttoni said that it’s technically doable.
According to Swiss inventor, the train would levitate on magnets, allowing it to spin in a partial vacuum and travel at speeds of up to 500 km/h. The submerged bridge on which it would travel would be 15 metres wide in diameter and be placed on concrete pillars 30 metres below the surface of the water.
“The engineer’s tunnel measures 14.5 meters in diameter and is designed to withstand earthquakes, internal and external explosions, flooding, tsunamis and landslides,”
a press release by the student’s faculty at research institute EPFL reads.
For now, it seems, Lake Geneva is unlikely to get its own version of the Hyperloop, even if similar projects have been studied in Germany, Norway and Japan.
Hyperloop One, a project by Virgin, FS Links and KPMG, is confident it can build a 28-minute service to link the Swedish capital of Stockholm and the Finnish capital Helsinki, via the Aland Islands.
The Hyperloop train, which would carry passengers in a pod in a tube free of air resistance or friction at speeds of up to 800 kilometres an hour, is the brainchild of Elon Musk.
Routes have also been studied to link the Czech cities of Prague and Brno, while a trans-American line is an ultimate goal. The United Arab Emirates is also planning to build a Hyperloop for cargo.
