Aidan if you like high speed rail, you'll like the new loop thing being currently trialed in the USA?

IT apparently zips along at or just under or just over the speed of sound, and goes from nought to a hundred in 2 seconds?

The boffins are laying out a (vacuum sealed?) tunnel to apparently reduce or remove friction as a speed limiting factor?

Given an electric rail gun the motive force? Potential top speed, just under the speed of light.

In any event this new system would get you from Brisbane to Sydney in just 40 minutes.

The cost of energy is the limiting factor! Oh for the days when we the people owned all the operation, generation and distribution!

Even now the cost of a kilowatt hour of energy at the power plants is just cents. Then you need to add on things like debt servicing, shareholder's demands, distribution losses, around a published 64% transmission line losses, around a published 11%, licence fees corridor acquisitions, maintenance, repairs and tax, all grabbing their share?
For mine we should investigate cheaper than col thorium. These things would need to be buried in bedrock to overcome any real danger or negative anxieties.

The Indians would seem to be well down the road to producing a working 300 KPH example or prototype as early a this year?

And given they need minimal maintenance for the life of the project, can be sited directly below the transit corridor to provide the cheapest possible energy.

Putting the train in a tunnel even one laid out above ground, like a pipeline, makes sense to me, given the possible speed. As does a one way loop and matched speeds! Stops and stations needing a separate exit and entry siding.

Somewhere in the back of my ancient mind is a memory of a theoretical ion drive placed in the nose cone to eliminate some of the friction?

I don't know how that might work unless it actually punches a hole in the air just immediately ahead of the projectile?
Cheers, Alan B.

Correction, it's distribution losses that are 64% with the 11% applicable to transmission line losses? I seem to have (online)company ( a key logger?) that's editing what I write to make some of it come out as nonsense? Or force a retype? [W 10 take note, the unhackable system may be being hacked at the keyboard?]

@ ateday lead by example.

Alan B,

"if you like high speed rail, you'll like the new loop thing being currently trialed in the USA?"
The Hyperloop? I don't think it's at all practical at the moment. If high speed rail between two large cities reaches capacity then it may be worth considering, but even then I think another HSR line is more likely to be the best way to supplement the first one, with the intermediate option of an untubed Maglev also preferable to the Hyperloop. Construction costs are just too high.

If the Hyperloop is suitable for anything, it will be connecting pairs of large cities nonstop; it won't be much good for decentralization.

And where did you get your 64% figure from?