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Chennai-Bangalore route could be Hyperloop’s India debut, travel time 30 mins

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CIOL Writers
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Chennai to Bangalore in just 30 minutes! You read it, right folks. With Hyperloop One having set its eyes on India, this might soon be the amount of time it will take you to travel between the two cities. Mumbai will be a little more than an hour away.

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Recently, the company also tweeted the routes it is interested in. These include Chennai-Bangalore, Chennai-Mumbai, Bangalore-Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai-Delhi.

The brainchild of Elon Musk, HyperLoop One proposes to propel people in travel pods at 1,200kmph through a tube that floats in a vacuum inside the tunnel.

The company has apparently approached Union ministry of road transport with a letter of intent. According to the sources, the routes being considered were meant to run bullet trains, and Japanese and Chinese teams have started studying the Chennai-Bangalore route to find out if they can lay tracks to run high-speed trains.

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While there are many factors that raise doubts about the feasibility of this technology especially the prohibitive costs involved in manufacturing and operating such a system, Hyperloop says it can move people for the price of bus tickets and that they are going to charge for the time taken and not the transport.

The team behind the project says it is planning to install prefabricated tubes atop pillars, a move aimed to cut down cost and time of construction. Solar panels on top of the tubes and windmills on the pillars to tap energy will further reduce operational cost.

But things won’t be that simple. While the first line between Abu Dhabi and Dubai may come up within the stipulated time frame of next time frame, India would be a tougher ground. Procedural delays and time taken for approvals from the government are very likely to be more expensive than bus tickets.

However, Hyperloop’s letter of intent shows that it is very serious about setting up shop in the country. And who knows if the company makes it through all hurdles and changes the way we travel here in India.