In 2013, a whitepaper that aimed to revolutionise transport appeared on the internet. The paper had been published by Elon Musk, who had sat down with some SpaceX and Tesla engineers to flesh out the idea for what they called Hyperloop.

People thought the whitepaper would come with the news that Musk was launching a new company. But surprisingly, it didn’t. Instead, he made the idea and research open source. By doing that, he had left a tantalising engineering challenge.

Almost a decade after the publication of Musk’s paper, Ferrovial are collaborating with Hyperloop TT, a company aiming to have passengers in pods in a 3-5km tube in the next three years.

On this episode of Sounds Like Infrastructure we look at the technology behind Hyperloop, what it means for the train and plane, and ask what benefits Hyperloop could bring to our cities in the form of social equality.

We also find out what happened in the 1840’s when a system that uses some of the same technology as Hyperloop was brought into service. Spoiler alert, it didn’t go well…

Sounds like Infrastructure is a podcast produced by Ferrovial. Our team includes Kevin Garcia King, Candela Del Valle Dominguez, Jose Luis Garcia Guaita, Theresa Beno, Arantxa Gulías Valverde, and Craig Lawless. Editing by Craig Lawless.

We have a great blog with more infrastructure stories like this one at https://blog.ferrovial.com/en/. You can also learn more about Ferrovial at www.ferrovial.com.

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