The Skyscraper-Based Vertical Rail Hub Is Engineering Without Problem Solving

The Hyper-Speed Vertical Train Hub comes via British designers Christopher Christophi and Lucas Mazarrasa. The idea is as you see it. Trains, instead of lining up horizontally with platforms between them, blast downward from the sides of buildings. Passengers are kept upright through the ordeal via ferris wheel-style rotating seat zones. The design won the duo an honorable mention in eVolo Magazine’s 2014 Skyscraper Competition and at least two not at all skeptical blog posts. That's fine—the design isn't a proposal, just neat future-thoughts

Even future-thoughts sometimes beg cynical, real-life thoughts though, and it's maybe worth mentioning a couple of things about the Vertical Train Hub. One, how do you in practice load a train? Are people climbing short flights of steps to each individual car-level? Elevators? Like one big elevator that loads all the passengers and then descends the train length, depositing those riders at every platform-floor? That seems inefficient, but not nearly as inefficient as having like three elevators per train and passengers jostling around trying to get the best elevator for their seating position.

Also, wouldn't a tower of roaring trains (even future-trains tend to roar) be the worst thing ever—next to incinerator stacks or a tire fire—for neighboring property? The would-be/stated benefit of the train tower is freeing up land for a park or whatever, but most big train terminals I can think of off the top of my head bury their tracks and platforms, so it's moot. It's possible to walk the streets around Grand Central Station in New York and have no idea that you're cruising around on top of two levels of commuter rail platforms. In New York at least, if you look at proposals and actual construction happening around Manhattan's core Grand Central and Penn stations, it's evident that underground space isn't exactly scarce either. Tunneling underground is expensive, of course, but so is attaching fully loaded high-speed trains to the vertical sides of buildings.

Also: do you really want the potential energy of a suspended train just hanging out like that, as people are stepping onto the thing? It's a bit like boarding a plane in mid-flight.

Finally, what may be the most technical flaw. In marrying a train tower with a network of train routes, you wind up not saving very much digging at all, in any imagined scheme. This is because train routes in cities don't race off radially from train terminals. Routes, as they approach their termini, bundle together more and more until the network winds up with just one or a couple of high-traffic lines that actually enter the station. That makes sense for commuter lines and inter-city lines; it saves digging and keeps things organized. Even airplanes, unencumbered by physical pathways, do this departing and arriving at airports: one direction in, one out.

I imagine then that you'd have to build some sort of rail "belt" around a train tower to concentrate the traffic and send it outward, unless ditching efficient transit engineering is just part of the tower concept. Imagine, for example, Penn Station as a tower. That terminal, serving Amtrak, NJ Transit, and the Long Island Railroad, sees 1,200 trains come and go per day. They all travel to/from the station along one of only three routes, each one constituting a bundle of many different train lines; for example, every train going north via Amtrak or to Long Island goes one way and those lines only start splitting on the other side of the East River. That's efficient, economically and environmentally.

Now, imagine the same setup with say two towers of trains (or three or four?) departing in radial tunnels. Instead of concentrated rail cores, you have the frayed end of a wire (at the tower base) that needs to recombine itself into each of these three Penn Station outlets or, alternatively, journey outward in its new very own, very inefficient tunnel. That's a mess, and an utterly pointless one at that. Different train lines are bundled together for very good reasons.

Of course, proposals like this aren't meant to be picked apart like this. Design is not necessarily the realm of engineering and this wouldn't actually pass even the very first engineering test, namely, does it solve a problem? It doesn't, no—the land/space issue was solved well over a century ago—nor would it succeed against really any sane competing proposal. Which is just the buzzkill of the engineering design process. That buzzkill is a quiet one and when people wonder why we can't have crazy future-ideas served up at the behest of a few billion dollars in creative financing, it probably has to do with engineering and its associated process of weeding out bad ideas according to brutally real objectivity. In other words, sorry about your train towers.