Italy on train: high speed and hyperloop

In the whole Italy we always complain about the poor service of the trasports. Late trains or lines totaly absent not only between the small towns, but even between the capital of provinces. However are we sure that it’s so bad? We can really travel from one side to another of the country in train, how many in the world can say the same? Don’t we see the changing that slowly and inexorably is overwhelming us?

Maybe we don’t see it, but the world see it, as much as that Italy arrived seventh in the global league of the countries with the best infrastructures of the high speed trains. But that’s not all. It seems that the beautiful country is the next target for the realization of a line of the supersonic train hyperloop. How is and how will be this Italy in train?

In the top ten of the high speed

To list the league was the german Omio, a platform for train travels booking. With its 896 kilometers of line at high speed active the Italy takes place in the seventh position in the world. The first in Europe is the Spain, which anyway takes the primacy from us for a bunch of kilometers, with its 904 kilometers of high speed.

The first of the league in the world is the China, with 30.000 kilometers of high speed. But we have even to say that the Italy is much more smaller than the China and than many other countries in the world and so, in reality, our seventh position worths maybe much more.

We aren’t, therefore, between the best in the world only for the kilometers, but even for the speed. The national average is about 300 km/h, but the record was touched with the 394 km/h of the line which goes from Rome to Milan. The 580 kilometers that separates the two most important cities of the peninsula are daily covered in less than 3 hours. For the speed we arrive third in the world, after France and Spain.

The hyperloop trains arrives in Italy

Hyperloop is the train on which the TransPod works after the project launched by SpaceX. It is a magnetic levitation train, composed by really light pods launched inside a tube through magnets, which should be able to reach the 1200 km/h. The futuristic project could become soon reality in many parts of the world. They talked about a line which connects Dubai to Abu Dhabi, until the 2020, and about another line that from Montreal will reach Toronto, until the 2030, but no one though that the train of the future would land soon even in Italy.

Instead, they think and hope that it will be like that. The project provides to connect the cities of Bologna and Milan in just 9 minutes. Currently we need one hour and half to do it.

The support of Italy

We know that the call launched by SpaceX was for the whole world and so it was predictable that in the realization of the supersonic train there was some italians too. It is right from here that was born the cooperation between the TransPod and an italian group based on the Polytechnic of Bari.

Many hope that the project will become soon reality but the official announcement didn’t arrive yet. “Until the end of the 2019 together with the region interested we want to announce two projects for our transport’s system in Italy”, claimed Gabriele Gresta, founder of Hyperloop Transportation Technlogies, one of the companies born to answer to the challenge launched by SpaceX.

Meanwhile in those days Gresta is already around Italy to meet many investors which are ready to believe in his project.

Hyperloop should be really a great investment, Gresta believes that, while to amortize the costs of the normal high speed lines we need 100 years, for the supersonic train will be enough just 8 years. This because it would produce much more energy than what it neeeds. The tubes would be, infact, covered by solar panels, equipped with wind turbines and geothermal plants and, even, the energy made by the slowdown could be stored and used inside the system.

The present of the Italy on train already resulted to be much more rosy than what we thought, who knows if the future will be even brilliant.

This post is also available in: Italiano