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Platform Chats
Platform Chats
The Future of Hyperloop
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The wait is over. On this episode, host Walt Bleser talks with Josh Giegel, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, and Sarah Quick, Director of Regulatory Affairs, both of Virgin Hyperloop, about the exciting future of hyperloop and the role AREMA could play in that future. Along the way, they’ll discuss the importance of safety and safety regulations in the development of hyperloop, the importance of sharing knowledge in the rail industry, and the similarities and differences between hyperloop and the railroad. Leave your thoughts of pneumatic bank tubes behind, this is a discussion of an innovative option for a safe, sustainable future in passenger transportation. This is the opportunity for seamless movement at super-high speeds and yes, there will be bathrooms.
So Arima, you know, the vision for Arima that I think that they play a key role is obviously helping us develop the first level of functional definitions for Hyperloop here in the US. We are doing that broadly across the globe, but you know, it's been going on for about two years, and Arima has already shown the skill set and the proven history of doing that for the rail industry, and I think they can help us.
SPEAKER_00You may know the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance of Way Association, or AREMA, as the quote, keepers of the manual. You may know them as the quote people behind the largest annual railroad conference in North America. Heck, you may not know about AREMA at all. This podcast is designed, no pun intended, to change your view of who AREMA is and how AREMA has changed the trajectory of many railway careers over its 100-plus year history. Welcome to Platform Chat with your host, Walt Blesser, where he takes a moment to discuss the impacts AREMA has had on the very people who are proud to be called members. Are you ready to roll with AREMA?
SPEAKER_01This episode is brought to you by Unabridged Structures. Unabridged Structures provides mentorship and advisement to emerging technologies and early stage companies focused on infrastructure. They have a proven track record of bringing technology solutions to the railway industry. For more on Unabridged Structures, go to Unabridged Structures.com.
SPEAKER_02Hello and welcome to episode number eight of AREMA's Platform Chats. I'm your host, Walt Blesser, Director Structures Functional Group. And I will tell you, I'm coming off of a bit of a hangover from Arima. As it relates to last week, we had a great virtual conference. It's definitely not the same kind of hangover I'd be coming off of if it was an in-person conference. Looking forward to that potentially next year, after two of these situations where we're watching recorded PowerPoints, we did the best we could. I hope everybody got as much of it out of it, or as much out of it as they could. I know that all of the presenters did their best to be live and in person on the side answering your questions. I was able to witness several of the presentations. I thought they went extremely well, but I think I echo everybody else's uh thoughts when I say look looking forward to being in person. And we will be in Denver, Colorado, next fall. So I appreciate the membership of Arima taking the time to travel to visit me. I know that's probably why we're meeting in Denver, and I'm gonna not let that one die. Also, in the news that everyone's following, since you are now on episode eight, uh, we have moved up the charts on the best railway industry podcast meter. I know that there's a someone said there's 25. Uh we were 13, and I'm very proud to announce that we made it to 12. So I know that's a little bit of a womp womp, but uh, you know, it's one step at a time here. Maybe after today's podcast, we can jump from 12 into the top 10. That's my goal, because today we are gonna take a little turn away from talking to uh members, if you will, that have been talking about their careers or talking about the importance of REMA, and we are gonna look into the lens of the future. I hinted at this in our podcast where we introduced Committee 35, which is the IT committee, but we are actually now going to speak in depth about Hyperloop and Hyperloop in the United States specifically. Today on the podcast, I have two guests from Virgin Hyperloop. I have the co-founder and CEO. Josh will go ahead and do his own introduction, and I will also have Sarah Quick do her introduction. She is the director of regulatory affairs and standards for Virgin Hyperloop. And for the ARIMA uh membership, she does have some street cred because she comes from TTCI. She spent some time in the railway industry before she moved on to Hyperloop. Uh so with that, you know what, Josh? If you could start, I'd love it if you could just do a brief introduction of who you are and how in the world did you become the CEO of Virgin Hyperloop.
SPEAKER_03Thanks for having me on, Waltz. And uh hopefully we were able to say live up to the hangover of the last one that you've done. Hopefully this one's an even better one. So, but no, I'm uh Josh Goggle, CEO, co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop. So started the company about seven years ago. And with that, prior to that, I had worked at SpaceX after grad school for a number of years, working on rocket engines, then moved over into the uh waste heat to power sector, developing some new technology to use carbon dioxide to generate more power without having to burn any more fuels. And so, you know, after doing space, after doing energy, I said, why not do transportation? And so for us, really the opportunity here is really quite profound. And and with the railroad and the background that the railroad has created in the US, you know, if you look at the fact that it became an industrial mite, you know, really that 1860 to 1890 expansion, we're looking at trying to do something similar with a hyperloop, but using you know technology from the 21st century, using speeds on demand and the like, and being able to do that creates something that's going to be around long after we are moving at the speed of an aircraft for a fraction of the energy. And with that, it was just too exciting to pass up. And now, as the father of a three-year-old, I'm actually wondering if trains should have been what I went into because he is way more obsessed with trains than hyperloop. He at least knows what a hyperloop is, but it's trains, trains, trains all the time.
SPEAKER_02I, you know what, I gotta tell you, I've got a two-year-old, and um, I don't know if uh they just come pre-programmed with trains and dinosaurs, but uh it just seems to be a universal thing, and he also likes trains. However, he has no idea what a hyperloop is. And speaking of children, Sarah, I think you're uh gonna join us soon to have someone that that can also have an affection affection for trains.
SPEAKER_05That's right. Yep, only a couple of days off by the sounds of it if she doesn't come earlier. So um, and I'm pretty sure she'll be a train enthusiast and now a hyperloop enthusiast, which will be very cool. So she'll get to bring the technology into the future.
SPEAKER_02Cool. So what exactly do you do for Hyperloop?
SPEAKER_05Uh, well, that's a really good question. So I basically work on the regulatory front of working with associations, things like AREMA, um, standards bodies, uh, our lovely FRA counterparts, and looking at basically how do we bring this new technology into the future of transportation? So, what are those pathways and what do we need to do to get there? Josh obviously provides the engineering and obviously the technology, and I look at how we can align that and provide the safety confidence with the regulators and also working with standards bodies and uh engineering entities such as yourself to support us in those pathways.
SPEAKER_02Got it. So you you brought up the everyone's favorite word, which is regulator. And so I'm just gonna jump right on that one. So, how in the world did we even come to have this conversation? I know Vic Babin, uh the previous AREMA president, was very excited about Hyperloop, and I believe he made the introduction to you. So could you just give us the short story of how uh Virgin Hyperloop came to having discussions with Arima?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, sure, why not? Um so we actually we have a pretty extensive safety board within uh VH, and we have specialists from across the industry that really help us understand expectations and new things coming into the industry. And one of our members is actually Ali from Wabtech and has a great relationship with Arima and Vic Babin. Um, and I've also known Vic Babin through circles through TTCI and all those fun places. And we when the announcement came from the Net Council and DOT that uh FRA was going to be our regulatory body going forward, they were like, this is great news, this is fantastic, you know, this is probably the best regulator you can have to really transition this technology into the future. And they wanted to be a part of that journey. So we looked at what we can do to support each other, to obviously build a really confident relationship, um, and obviously fast track our technology and build the confidence with FRA. So they're the things we're working on right now. This podcast is obviously one of them. Uh, and then we're also looking at things like how do we mimic what a rim has done in the last 120 years and build a version of that for Hyperloop, you know. Uh, I think there's a lot to be learnt in the last 120 years from, as you said, wooden bridges to concrete bridges and all those type of fun things that we want to take those learnings and move it into our learnings uh and get moving. So we've done a lot with the technology, and Josh will go through all that, but we also have to look at how do we build the confidence in the regulator with our engineering.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so I'm gonna look to Josh here. So FRA stands for the Federal Railroad Administration, and Josh is a guy that worked for SpaceX, and now he's with he's gone to the other side with Virgin and the the Hyperloop, and that to me sounds pretty space age. And I think there's Josh, I'll be honest with you, there's probably people listening to this podcast, or there's people within the ARIMA membership body that think that the Hyperloop is a large version of what they used to use. Well, actually, some of our members still use at the drive up at the bank. So maybe you can go ahead and explain the differences and and get uh maybe show some of the parallels from an engineering perspective of how how the whole thing maybe works.
SPEAKER_03No, appreciate appreciate that. The uh the bank the bank tube pneumatic tube analogy is always my my favorite one. So what we have in principle is is quite a bit different than the the bank tube, but the idea, the concept is is overly, I'll say, relatable to that. So for us, we take a tube, we take most of the air out of that tube. It'd be equivalent of flying at about 200,000 feet of altitude or about five times higher than normal aircraft. And so when you do that, you have very little or low amount of air in the tube, and that allows you to go tremendous speeds for a fraction of the energy consumption. So it's really important that we have little air in there. That way we can go these high speeds without having to consume a lot of power. And then what we actually have, and one of the early concepts of hyperloop is instead of the bank tube, is a column of air pushing pods all over the place. That's about as energy inefficient as you could possibly get. So we decided not to do that. And we went with a form of magnetic levitation and then electromagnetic propulsion. And so our system is completely contactless. So that means we don't have steel wheels grinding on steel rail. We have basically a magnetic levitation system that allows us to glide smoothly, react to bumps, deal with undulations and things like that. And then when it comes to our propulsion system, we've actually have an independent propulsion and levitation system. So that means I don't need a big heavy vehicle to create traction so that I can move forward. Um, that allows us to climb steeper hills and do quite a bit more creative alignment opportunities in the way that we would have this. So our levitation system, and we'll probably cover a little bit more about how that actually works, but our levitation system gives us the ability to move at these speeds. The propulsion system is using a contactless propulsion system, electromagnetic principles, that allows us to get up to full speed. Full speed is on the order of about 500 miles an hour. And so being in that tube is actually really important because then you don't have weather issues, you don't have at-grade crossings, you don't have other vehicles that can get in the way of tracks or animals or people or kids or anything like that. And when you put all that together, you have these individual pods. And one of the biggest things that we've done over the last couple of years is really reinvent these these pods. So this audience is really familiar with kind of the four different ways that you could make linear infrastructure. One is your your classic train where you've got your tracks and you've got your diesel-powered, or an olden times a steam-powered locomotive pulling everything. You have something like high-speed rail, where you have a power system, like a catenary system, or third rail over the whole track, and then the locomotive takes the power off. You have something like a classic maglev that has the motor distributed, and then there's the vehicle and a road analogy. And what is special about a vehicle and a road is that the road is very dumb and the car is very smart. So the model three that we drive today can drive on the same road as a Model T from over a hundred years ago. And that's because the road's very simple and it has no moving parts. And so what we decided to do a couple of years ago was make our tube very simple and our pod very smart, which means our tube is nothing but steel or concrete, it has no moving parts, it has no active parts, all of the control, all of the power, batteries, they stay on the vehicle. And so when I want to get off, I don't have to move a piece of track. I basically just turn on and turn off a ma uh electromagnet on the vehicle, much like a car getting off at an off-ramp, instead of having all these mechanical switches, which are a big safety issue when you look at a high capacity system that we're trying to be. And so with that, you've got individual pods that hold about 25 to 30 passengers. They form convoys, so they're following each other, but they're not mechanically coupled. And then those pods can go directly to your destination. So, for example, we could leave Los Angeles, the first two pods could be going to Seattle, next two to Portland, and the next four to uh San Francisco, and they all can leave together and they can peel off when they get to their destination without having to stop. So you're not stopping at every place along the way, you're maintaining a high speed, and you have the ability to have a high capacity, we're talking about tens of thousands of passengers per hour.
SPEAKER_02Wow. I don't quite know how to follow that up. That's fantastic. I I'm I'm thinking of the 500 mile an hour speeds, and I'm thinking about the analogy to high-speed rail, where when high-speed rail came into California, everybody wanted it. So when you start talking about going from north to south, let's just talk about the Bay Area to Los Angeles, and you some of the urban planners might use the barbell terminology where you have dense centers for city core or populace, if you will. As you come into those locations, uh, I think sometimes the death of high-speed rail is the fact that everybody wants it, meaning everybody wants a stop, right? Versus the airline model of if you want to go to Denver, you're going to Denver. You're not going, there's not six stops in Denver for commercial uh airline. So, how does Hyperloop follow more of that airline style of how they locate the stations, if you will? Because I'm thinking about dwell time, I'm thinking about how do you get up to speed and go back down to uh a complete stop to let people on and off? Or is it does it require a massive amount of distance like it does uh in in a true high-speed rail situation? It's gonna take quite a bit of distance for that train to get up to speed and then come back down to zero. Does that does that make sense?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and so it it really does. And and a lot of the thought process you just outlined there is really one of the big value propositions that that we have. And that barbell effect. So you've got in the Los Angeles-San Francisco example is great. In Los Angeles, we have about four airports that are around Los Angeles, and about three or four inside of San Francisco as well. And so you're kind of finding the one that's nearest to you without having to deal with traffic and going to these other areas. And and what Hyperloop allows us to do is build a high capacity, high-speed trunk line. And then once you start getting into a city area, you have a couple of options. One, you could peel off like off-ramps and go directly to these destinations that allows you to get closer so that you're not having to stop at every place along the way. Or two, you just have a slower area inside of a city, um, not tremendously slower, but it allows you to have access to a number of more areas within a city. So imagine, you know, if you use the airport analogy, imagine you had a connector ring inside of Los Angeles that would connect all four airports together. And then that would have access to a trunk line that would go up to San Francisco, one that would go over to Las Vegas. Um, and to do that, you would take probably on the order of about 10 to 15 miles to get up to full speed. And what you would end up having is these off ramps, right? And these off ramps would allow you to have again this high capacity, but also take you to your destination without having to stop at every place along the way. And that's really one of the things that has really beset the high-speed rail project in California is what are you getting for what you pay? And if you look at an aircraft, okay, it's a pain to get to the airport, takes maybe an hour and a half to get to the airport. You're gonna pay probably on the order of maybe a hundred dollars at these days to get up the San Francisco round trip, and you'll get to San Francisco all in all in about four hours with from door to door. With a high-speed rail or the high proposed high-speed rail, that ticket price is maybe two to four times as expensive. It's gonna take a little bit longer. It'll take you know about the same amount of time to get to this to the station. You won't have to wait as long, but you're gonna stop at all these places. High speed rail in that corridor is not truly high speed, it might be 150 miles an hour. It's not like it might be in in in other parts of the world. And then you're stopping at every place. So now of a sudden you're gonna pay $300 for something that takes longer and is more inconvenient. Um, I don't know about you, but when you sort something on Amazon, those are usually not the filters that you use. I'll take the more inconvenient and more expensive uh option, please. So for for us, our thing is like that's not gonna be something that people want to do. You can look in Europe, you can look at these places now that are actually banning short haul flights. So that Las Vegas to, or sorry, that Los Angeles to San Francisco flight, no, it's not gonna be an option. Okay, so if if I have to go on a high-speed rail or have to drive, now it's become way more inconvenient for me. So how can we, I'll say, and have the environmental benefits, the time benefits of showing up when you want, going directly to your destination, not stopping along the way, and being able to do that with a a transport system of really like the future. And that's where Hyperloop really can come in and give a lot more options for a sustainable high-speed future than some of the current modes that exist.
SPEAKER_02Okay. I follow. So the I actually did not know that about the short haul flights. I know there was a horrible show on TV about a short haul flight between uh Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Maybe that's why that got canceled. I I'm sure it's not because the flights were canceled. All right. So the technology speeds, sightings, turnouts, stations. So you're you're using maglev technology, but a lot of it in principle at 10,000 feet with the off-ramps you described, for example, you're gonna have structures. You're it's still gonna be terrestrial, right? I mean, this does this reside above or below ground?
SPEAKER_03We can do either, but our preference is right now it's cheaper to build above ground. It's cheaper and it's faster. And the goal really being that you want to be able to build the infrastructure as quick as possible. I think I remember we voted for high speed rail when I was in grad school in California, and that was in 2008. And I don't know about you, but it still seems like it's quite far away. And so the the speed at which you can build these, the the other aspects of our system being inside of a tube mean we take less right-of-way. So to get these corridors, you can go on highway medians and still go in some of these speeds because we can bank like an aircraft, we can climb steeper hills, we can have smaller tunnels when we do have to tunnel. So all of those things end up driving the the overall cost down. But our preference right now would be to, or the fastest way, the cheapest way to end up building it is uh basically above ground at this point.
SPEAKER_02Okay. And so when you're okay, so you're above ground.
SPEAKER_03I'm assuming this is a steel structure, steel tube that's supported by steel or concrete. Depends on the cost of the local one. Areas. So some places it's easier to get steel, cheaper to get steel, other places concrete's actually the uh preferred building material. So either or.
SPEAKER_02Interesting. Okay. Yep. It does seem like the state of California likes their concrete, that is for sure, versus the East Coast. And it also sounds like you've got a very uh the a significant advantage. You talk about 2008, I teach a railroad bridge uh design class, and we talk a lot about just the the infrastructure that we have in the country. And you back in 08, you talk about Obama's uh vision for high-speed rail, and a lot of that's brownfield, right? So we've got we're we're we're talking shared corridors with uh existing freight railroads, and when we talk about speeds, we're talking about under 100 in a lot of places, not 180 to 200 plus. Um, so with this, it sounds like it would have its own dedicated byway. So you're not dealing with uh uh you're not you're not waiting for a freight train, for example, to come through, uh, as you might be in other parts of the country. I know we're talking about California with high-speed rail, et cetera, but there are 49 other states that don't have that uh going on right now and would probably like to benefit from this type of of technology. So with that in mind, if we are going to build this kind of infrastructure, I guess I'm gonna go to you, Sarah, and and and talk a little bit about the regulate you said that the FRA is the pref well preferred or required regulator. So how many systems, I know Virgin's one of them, how many competitors, if you will, are there? And how much regulation has even been established? Or are we are we talking we are at ground zero?
SPEAKER_05Wow, that's a good one. Um, so the best answer is we are at ground zero in the respect of anything on a development pathway. Um the Net Council in the last 18 months has put some solid groundwork on the table, which is looking at standards alignment across the uh competitors of the Hyperloop development industry, and of that there's about eight of us that are currently established worldwide, two of which are actually coexisting here in the US. Um, and what we're trying to do is look at what is the uniformity of the standards across our technology development across all eight of those high polop developers. And they're it's interesting, uh the net council's done a really great job of actually starting that groundpiece, but we haven't truly looked at what it means for the future. So we're still working on those pathways, and then on a separate tangent, we're working with FRA to look at what are going to be those minimal building blocks that they need from us, and vice versa, to really start establishing what an RPA process could look like, or even a baseline of a safety performance regime that both entities can work on consciously and build that um safety reliability in the the industry. So there's a lot of work going on there. Um we know that we're in the early stages of that, and when I say early stages, we've been working on it for two years. So we've still got, you know, as Josh would say, a pathway ahead of us to build that confidence. Um, and we're doing a lot of that through testing and development. We've got a facility out in Apex uh that Josh has built from scratch. Um, and he's got about 300 engineers that work out there, and we are in our second iteration of our technology, as you would probably know, from a lot of the YouTube and videos and so forth going out in the industry, and we want to build the the testing and development confidence within FRA through that facility we actually have out there. And I'll let Josh expand more on what we're doing out there later. Um so we invite the likes of FRA out to the facility to come see what we're doing, to have a look at what are our safety processes and our due diligence, and also what are the alignment to either existing standards or where do we need to improve standards for the industry? So, and that's where we've been working heavily lately.
SPEAKER_02So the testing facility, I assume that was built by you with no outside. I'm assuming all this money is private money. Very much so. Yeah, over to Josh.
SPEAKER_03Very much so.
SPEAKER_02You probably have there's a there's a lot of uh class one uh railroaders that'll listen to this that feel your pain. So there's a lot of uh private money regulated by the government. That's just the world we live in. Um, but I guess let me take a step back, though. This testing track is is it similar to the I call it the kidney bean loop out at uh TTCI that's about a 5k in length? Is it is it similar to that?
SPEAKER_03No, much, much, much shorter than that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so we'd love that amount of length, but uh that investor amount of money, as you've previously mentioned, is the uh the biggest inhibitor to that. But yeah, it's about 500, a little over 500 yards long. And that was kind of our prototype, or as Sarah mentioned, Gen 1 technology, where we really explore learning and exploring how the system was was going to work, actually putting it together, building it, learned a lot of things, right? It's it's easy to it's easy to read about being a brain surgeon until you actually open somebody's head up and try to operate. And so for us, it was a huge amount of how to build the infrastructure, what about the infrastructure worked and didn't, and that real learning that comes through doing informed a lot of what we call our generation two system that we're building, which is a pod side powered vehicle. So we gained enough experience over the first couple years of the company to feel confident that we could begin to put everything on the vehicle, and we've done just that now. And uh the other aspect that we really wanted to show at that facility was that in fact it could be made safe. So when we had, we go to DC, we would talk with the Department of Transportation, the FRA, and others, and then some of the congressional members that would come out to visit or we'd meet with, the number one question we always get asked is well, I guess the number two question. The first question is, is there a bathroom? It's the question everybody always has a tremendous amount of interest in, oddly. And then the second one is, is it safe? Um, so we did a passenger test last November on this prototype system. So myself and our director of passenger experience, uh, my colleague Sarah Lucian, she her and I were both the first two people to ride in a hyperloop. And we had to go through an independent safety assessor process. So something that high-speed rail and other rail processes go through. And it was really informative. You know, until then we're a company just building and iterating on designs really quick, and now all of a sudden you had the responsibility of human life. And the difference between myself being like an engineer who's helped build the system, who knows all the things that can go wrong and how we've mitigated them versus Sara, who's not an engineer, was just a fascinating experience. And it really hit home for me when we were sitting inside the pod just before we go down the tube. And I and I asked her just a question like, Sara, what speed would you feel comfortable? Or I'm sorry, uncomfortable? And her response is it's very different because as an engineer, you think about all the different things that go with speed, all the different things that could go wrong as you go to speed, how you'd mitigate them. But for her, it was simply if you're saying it's safe, if we're saying it's safe, then I'm comfortable. And it really had that the the weight of what we were trying to do, the weight of this not being a you know an unmanned rocket, the you know, essentially like early parts of my career, the the weight of it being my child or my wife or my you know, my mom would be riding on this. Now all of a sudden, and and when we started doing this project, one of the things I asked the team to do was write down a name of someone that you most cherish or most care about in the world, put it on a sticky note, put it on your desk. If this isn't safe enough for that person to ride, what are we doing? And that I think is just such a different feeling than when you're trying to develop a new a new technology from scratch. And so doing it with this independent safety assessor who put us through the ringer, and we know what it will take now to get this ultimately safety approved and the level of effort, the level of documentation, the level of work. It was just a really formative experience for us to have that so early in our development.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Um, and I think I'm gonna start with the obvious. Is there a bathroom?
SPEAKER_03There will be a bathroom. I can assure you there was not a bathroom on the one that we were on, though.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, hopefully you guys have the adult control for 500 yards or whatever the distance was for that. Um, you did break up just a bit with your internet there. I do believe you asked your colleague how safe, what speed it was, and I believe was the response that whatever speed you deemed safe, I think was your response.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, what whatever we were operating at, the assumption was that that speed was safe. And it's it's what you'd expect, right? If you get on a plane, you get on a train. If I'm getting on this plane, I expect it to be safe. I expect to get off of this plane.
SPEAKER_02Yep, agreed. Yeah, Sarah, do you want to pile onto that a little bit?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, like it's it's kind of interesting. Josh talks about the independent safety assessment. I don't think he talks about how grueling that pathway was for the company, is because we have 300 young young engineers um within the business that all had to go through those critical learning steps to understanding what safe was. You know, it's not exactly spelt out, you know, clearly to engineers of what is the expectation of safe, you know. So that whole pathway took them a whole year to just understanding what they've developed and how do they make it safe for the future. Um, and even for me, I learned really valuable lessons of the human understanding of what is safe. So, you know, we've done a lot of pieces of work from since that development of going out and going, what is our customers' expectation from us, you know, in a product? What are they looking for? And so Sarah Lucian, um, who's the director of passenger development and comfort, she's been working on some really good pieces to put out to the public to build those confident, you know, these are the things that we're making sure are going to happen with our engineering development. So it's kind of cool um to see a lot of those things because we're actually seeing a lot of feedback even from our other Hyperloop promoters are saying, This is awesome, guys. You know, they're learning from what we're learning about, and we're creating some really good collaboration pieces in industry. Um, and I don't know if we've talked about it, but we also work heavily in Europe in those collaboration pieces with other Hyperloop promoters in trying to build industry knowledge for Hyperloop. So we're not just here in the US, we're you know doing a lot of this work as well in Europe, and it's really starting to take sh like take shape across the world, which is really cool to see.
SPEAKER_02That's awesome. And the safety perspective, you know, this industry, the the railway industry, safety is paramount. I mean, every every meeting starts with a safety uh briefing, as you can probably imagine, in an industry where you're moving cars that weigh 286,000 pounds, and uh you've got human beings operating them, you have human beings involved with in the yards and uh in close proximity to these heavy steel wheels working on the tracks. Uh you've got situations in the Northeast Corridor where you've got very quiet electric trains coming up behind you at 100 plus miles an hour. It's you guys fully understand it's it's it is safety is paramount, and um and then moving of passengers is like you like you said, Josh, it's not uh the first rocket that went to the moon, I don't think carried a human, right? I think it was a monkey or something else like that. I'm pretty sure that's you know, we would like to have the first hyperloop send people. It sounds like you've already ridden it with your with your colleague. Um which and honestly, I'm sorry, it begs the question are there any operating hyperloops in the world right now?
SPEAKER_03No.
SPEAKER_02Okay, okay, just wanted to, and so we are really at ground zero here. And so I also heard you say that there were potentially eight total uh entities involved with the creation of this transportation mode. So, you know, one of the beauties of a REMA, and I I was explaining earlier on before we started the recording, is that it's a great way to exchange between competitors that are in the railway industry, such that uh I will pick on Union Pacific, a Union Pacific uh engineer in the structures department uh couldn't talk to the a CSX uh engineer in Jacksonville, Florida, and ask how he installs his railway ties on a certain bridge type. Let's just use that as an example. Uh it's an exchange of knowledge. I think that's what Arena prides itself as being a base for people, for engineers working for competing railways, um, to sit down and even railways that aren't competing, but to sit down and swap notes just so that the whole industry benefits, whether that's safer, cheaper, faster, stronger, uh, whatever that may be. So I guess my one of the questions that's coming to me right now is obviously a Rima would love to play a role in assisting you guys and creating potentially even a chapter. I mean, I guess I'll go to you, Sarah. How do you view do you do you view a Rima having a role in the future? And right now, if you were talking not to me, but to that 22-year-old engineer coming out of school that's excited to go work for Josh and his company, um how do you see uh a Rima playing a role in that?
SPEAKER_05Awesome. That's a really good question. I like that one. Um, so Arima, you know, the vision for Arima that I think that they play a key role is obviously helping us develop the first level of functional definitions for Hyperloop here in the US. We are doing that broadly across the globe, but you know, it's been going on for about two years, and Arima has already shown the skill set and the proven history of doing that for the rail industry, and I think they can help us. Um, and as you say, help us translate, be a translator. You know, what is a great way to uniform hyperloop technology and definitions of engineering? So that would be a really first key building block. But from there, you know, the most critical and benefit piece that a RIMA can deliver to someone like VH and the other competitors is safety definition. You know, what is the minimum safety requirements and understanding for Hyperloop? And that's kind of where we're heading. So I think that would be the first key stepping stone. Um, and then obviously through evolution and those pieces of work, we would look at obviously things like you know, tubes, vacuums, all those types of things of what would be the mandatory requirements of meeting the criteria for hyperloop technology and building on that. Um, and that would be, you know, probably a couple of years in making of building that. Now for the engineer uh enthusiast that wants to get into hyperloop, wow, all I'm gonna say is you're going to test everything that you learnt at university, and then you're gonna put it in the suitcase beside you, forget about it, and then you're going to basically start from scratch when you come to work from us because you are going to learn all the different types of engineering, all the different types of the world of transportation modes, and then cram it into one piece of technology. You don't just have rail, you have aerospace. Um, you know, we are taking the best of the best of technology and bringing it into this new mode of transportation. It has challenged me as an individual uh on so many fields that working for someone like Josh Geigler went, everything I've learned in 15 years, I've had to forget about and go, let's start again. So it's been an absolute challenge.
SPEAKER_02But that also sounds extremely exciting.
SPEAKER_05Oh, it's awesome.
SPEAKER_02I think that uh the industry that we're in now is is exciting. I I enjoy the industry. I've been in the rail industry for 22 years. It's fun. I enjoy it. Um I think that I think that the idea of building infrastructure, uh, greenfield infrastructure in this country is exciting. Um, I think anyone in this industry would agree that, yes, it's fun to maintain what we have now, but boy, wouldn't it have been neat to be those guys that are standing on the east bank of the Mississippi River looking at the West Bank, going, hmm, that's pretty wide. Uh right. How are we gonna get uh these heavy steel uh and cast iron vehicles across? So that's really cool. Are you guys hiring?
SPEAKER_05We are. I'll let Josh answer that.
SPEAKER_03Definitely. And to uh to really expound upon what what Sarah said, I would say curiosity is that number one thing. If you're curious, you're never gonna be disappointed here. There's always more things to learn, more things to do. Um, your your your comment about the Mississippi wall, it made me think of this old kind of Caesar quote when he came up, I think to the Rhine or something, and he had the barbarians on the other side, and he just built a bridge across it to show he could, and then unbuilt it and came back. And I will say for us, you know, we're we're building this not because we can, but because we should. And that I think is a really important aspect here is that yeah, there's there's always gonna be rail. You know, we're not here to to displace rail. I think we're here to offer you know the opportunity for us to be complementary to that. You know, one of the biggest questions that we've we've received from some of the class ones that we've talked to is, you know, it takes four days to go from Los Angeles to Chicago. I can't ship certain things because it's gonna take so long, right? Or I can't be competitive with autonomous trucks or whatever it might be. I have this right-of-way. What can I do with it? How can I monetize in the future? How can I help, you know, look at taking my company that's been around for maybe in in some various form for over a hundred years at this point, and say, like, I want to be around for the next hundred. And so the the people that are either working at class ones or other places right now that that that want to be kind of part of that and the excitement of that of taking everything that you've learned and and putting it to a suitcase to I won't say to just never look in again. I'll say to to peruse when you need to because there's a lot of value in things that are done before. But then to to to like be reimagine it and say, like, I could do, I know we have to do these things, but here's a better way to do them, and let's do it that way. And that I think is like such an exciting aspect of what you know being an engineer is, and I know that's what gets me excited every day and a number of of the people that work here.
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, I guess I'll pile right onto that. The freight perspective. Uh, we've talked a lot about passengers, and you just mentioned what I was just wondering is uh I think that North America and Arima and the North America Railway System prides itself as being the leader in the globe as it relates to heavy axle load or how uh loadings. So you think of unit trains, you think of intermodal, you think of big, heavy, long freight. I think people from across the globe would look to us as to how are you guys handling that kind of load? With Hyperloop, I think the majority of people, when they hear it, I think they immediately think passengers. Um is there a load capacity issue, or or I mean, is it something that is is Hyperloop thinking that someday they're gonna carry 300,000 pound cars of or pods of coal? I I think by that time we might be done with coal, but that um I think you follow what I'm asking.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's it's a great question, you know, and that's really why things will always be complementary. I mean, when you look at the marketplace for cargo these days or freight, you know, 1% by mass is really transported by air, but it represents like 30-35% of the volume or sorry, uh the the monetization revenue from from that. And you know, there'll always be a need to move ore and rocks and coal and you know grain and all of those other things, and that's not what Hyperloop's ultimately gonna be for. It's gonna be that you know, the passenger side is gonna be on-demand goods, it's gonna be the ability to move things, I think, quite a bit more seamlessly, but a lot of things don't demand the super high speeds. Um so I think you always have a degree of a freight network uh to do these these heavy loads. We'll call it like the 50 to 75 percent of the by mass of the volume. But when you look at where things are starting to go, you're seeing an increase in cargo flights. You know, our biggest investor is actually a logistics and shipping company, a company called Dubai Port. And they're interested about reinventing the idea of a port. So instead of goods coming in, they go into an inland depot. There's all of these handling. Each one of those handlings is an expensive transaction, right? Let's get them off the boat. Let's do one handling. And now I could do kind of same-day shipping to all parts of the US or all parts of a country, all parts of a continent. And when you really expand that, you could say right now from the shipping industry, you know, to go from Beijing to Berlin, it takes maybe five to eight weeks on a boat, or five to six weeks on a boat. And think about doing that whole thing in something on the order of maybe 10 or 11 hours. Like what would that do? And you look at the way you know China is investing in the One Belt One Road Initiative, right? And they're investing, you know, something on the order of about $100 billion to improve the average speed on that route by about 20 to 40 miles an hour, you know, from maybe 40 miles an hour to 80 miles an hour. And you think about the investment, the amount of money people are putting into those things, it's like this is an opportunity to say, like, all right, well, here's a here's like something that could be potentially a lot more time savings for some of these goods, be able to reduce some of the logistics, the warehousing, all of these other areas, giving a lot more opportunity. But there's still gonna be things that, you know, I I don't see us shipping, you know, a hundred, you know, a hundred tons of of like ammonium nitrate. Like that's just not what we're gonna do. Right. And that's that's where there'll always be some of these needs. So working with them, complementing, and you look at what that means for a railroad, that means like now I have access to something that historically only trucks were able to access, right? And so you have a potentially larger market. If you look at it from an aircraft perspective or an airline perspective, now I have the ability to access a short haul train market, right? And so you can kind of look at for any of these potential partners, there's different ways for us to expand their marketplace instead of just you know saying we're gonna take market share away from you. It's actually no, it's an expansion because these are things you weren't able to do before because there's not a piece of technology that does it.
SPEAKER_02Okay. And I guess this might be another elephant in the room, and and it might be, I'm not sure which of you wants to answer this one. So when we do start talking about connecting, let's just use Los Angeles. I know you guys are, I know you're LA based. Let's talk about like Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Um how do you procure the land? Or is that is there funding or shared funding via the states, the government? Is this all private money? Um, obviously, as you guys are well aware, that the class ones own and operate all of their own infrastructure as opposed to the trucking industry, which operates on federally funded and state funded infrastructure. So, where do you guys fall in in that world?
SPEAKER_03So I'll I'll start the first part of that and let Sarah take the the second part. And and one was really it's gonna be a mixture of of both and up until uh private funding, public funding, you know, public-private partnerships, particularly here in the US. And one of the big things that we had to do was become eligible in the same way that roads and highways are, and and potentially passenger rail systems are as a mode of transportation. So, Sarah, you want to just talk a little bit about what that was for us over the last year?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so um basically what we've been doing is working obviously to become a part of critical infrastructure. So we uh have built the language to be considered under the infrastructure bill, and so we can be considered for the similar opportunities like existing infrastructure, like rail, highway, all those type of things, and access those corridor segments, um, but also the funding streams that come with that. So with that, that was recently passed and accepted. So we are now obviously going through a number of avenues for generating funding to obviously start building some of these infrastructures and get involved in projects, all those type of things. Um, but that's taken a couple of years just to get that language built into the infrastructure build to be considered for that. So um things like old rail corridors that aren't being utilized, you know, these are the type of things that we're going to try and harness. And we've actually been doing a lot of feasibility studies with a number of entities across the US to look at where we can maximize infrastructure that's currently either not in use or be in parallels with existing infrastructure where there is uh sizing and spacing for our corridor segments. Um, and Josh couldn't even talk about our size of our corridor segments, but we don't actually um we don't utilize as much corridor segments as your standard rail corridor. Uh what's our total width again, Josh? Of uh alignment?
SPEAKER_03It's on the order of about 45 feet.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_03So and if you're elevated, that might just be the column column bases as well. So which is a lot smaller than that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, exactly. So we can either use existing structures, uh existing corridors that are being used, or redundant ones. So uh and that's what we're gonna capitalize on with the private side of things. Obviously, they're look you know it's working with entities to obviously purchase private land, uh, but in minimal capacities.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Wow. Well, I gotta tell you, this has been I could go on for another hour. Uh, and I'm sure you guys could probably go on for many, but I are very busy people. I want to just say thank you so much for coming on the show. Um sounds like there's all kinds of opportunities for our listeners, for young people, uh, people looking for career changes. Um heck, I heard from Josh there's potentially even uh opportunities within the confines of railroads that people may already work for, just as it relates to uh the interactions with Hyperloop as we move into the future. Uh from the arena perspective, it looks like there's also opportunities here to potentially build a committee and uh to maybe potentially even unite. Is there a group? Um is there any kind of any sort of grouping or association of the eight competitors, or is it loosely uh defined? Um or do you not talk and work in at night underneath sheets?
SPEAKER_05No, no, no. Uh so we actually have a number of committees that we're working together on globally, uh, that we work particularly in the European Commission setting. Uh so we've got some DG Move groups that we're working in, and we meet quarterly. Uh, then there's the European Infrastructure Managers Group that we all work together on as well. Very similar, actually, to a Rima's work, is looking at how do they build the infrastructure for Europe and us. And we've created a hyperloop industry underneath there, and we're trying to do that now in the US. Uh, and Arima's our avenue to do that, so that's why we're getting the ball rolling and we want to start things moving and building confidence in the industry.
SPEAKER_02Perfect. And uh it's my understanding that Josh, or I'm sorry, Sarah filled out a form uh explaining how she wanted to join a Rima and how much it was gonna cost, submitted that to Josh, and he approved it. Is that right? So you are officially a member?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, we are officially a member.
SPEAKER_02Yep. Card carrying dues paying. I appreciate that, Sarah, and I think it's gonna be great to have you on board. And I've even talked to Vic a little bit about the potential that you might even be one of our first chair people. So that's kind of exciting stuff. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that could be well.
SPEAKER_02I think everybody just heard that, so we're gonna have to hold you to that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and we're looking forward to having a partnership with Arima. I think we can do a lot of good things together. Um, and let's get Hyperloop actually moving. You know, we're ready. And I know you know the world's ready for Hyperloop. So, you know, with the feedback we get, um, it's amazing. Josh just gets slammed all the time with people wanting to know more. Um, you know, he's a one-man show, and you know, I think we're ready to get out there and build confidence.
SPEAKER_02So I think what I just heard is Josh is a busy guy and he gets annoyed by people wanting to have podcasts talking about more about the hyperloop. Is that right, Josh?
SPEAKER_03No, I I I love my my I I like taking people and saying that like Hyperloop is not some literal pipe dream decades from now. It is something that's like happening today. And you get to see that that chat that smile on your face. And uh, you know, we go out to the desert, we get to go out pretty much every week out to Vegas, you get to see a Hyperloop, you get to see a real Hyperloop, and you get to see we built that, this is what's next, these are the things that are coming, and uh so it's gonna take, you know, it's gonna take more than the 300 people that work at this company to have Hyperloop become a reality. And the more people that we have yearning and pining for a Hyperloop, the easier it'll be to build once we we're ready to.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. Well, I hope that uh all three of our offspring get to experience that in the future, as well as I'd like to experience it myself, to be frank. So thank you both for being on the show. And uh we hope to see you, Sarah, specifically at uh at a REMA conference soon. Okay, thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_05Thanks. Thanks, Well.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for rolling with Arima on today's episode of Platform Chat. For further information about Arima, please visit arema.org or contact us at info at arema.org.
