Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Needs This Gorgeous Passenger Station

Ethnod · September 10, 2013

If he builds it I'll come to america just to travel on it, crazy ass security be dammed. Looks incredible, someone should fund this

There’s been plenty of analysis of exactly how Elon Musk’s Hyperloop could work, but there hasn’t been much imagination on how passengers could embark on their 700 mph voyage. That’s where Serge Roux comes in.

The French industrial designer and mechanical engineer completely changed the passenger loading area originally proposed by Musk, putting the the “loop” in Hyperloop by replacing the rotating turntable in favor of a gorgeous cylindrical structure that envelops the tracks into a flowing, two-story building.

The tubes circle the outer walls of the structure and would accommodate three passenger capsules at a time. Each vehicle would decompress at the same time, venting air into the atmosphere, and then closing off to form a vacuum moments later. Roux admits that his station design would increase the amount of time it would take for the 28 passengers on each capsule to load and unload, but it’s negligible, going from 2.5 minutes to three. And by increasing the overall size of the embarking and disembarking structure, it could better accommodate peak-hour passenger flows by getting three times more people on board, with the capsules shooting off with one-minute buffers between each launch.

Roux estimates the building would be slightly smaller than an average train station, with solar panels adorning the roof and the center of the Hyperloop donut housing all the typical amenities and requirements of any other transit hub, including shops, restaurants, and yes, even a TSA screening area. But he didn’t stop there.

Roux assumed that some kind of storage and maintenance system would have to be included in the design, and created a matching structure that could pull passenger capsules out of service, store them, and provide an area where service personnel could maintain them.

“I believe the design creates an elegant compact footprint that simplifies the workflow,” Roux tells WIRED. “[it] minimizes infrastructure complexity, while allowing longer embarking and disembarking periods … concentrating all the amenities within a single looped elevated track.”

Roux, keep an eye out for a call from the 650.

All images courtesy of Serge Roux.