If you’re a fan of rollercoasters, or near-death experiences, then you’re probably going to love British designers Christopher Christophi’s and Lucas Mazarrasa’s new idea: sticking high-powered, high-speed trains onto skyscrapers to speed up the morning commute.
Oh my God, that looks TERRIFYING
Christophi and Mazarrasa entered their design concept, called the Hyper-Speed Vertical Train Hub, into eVolo Magazine’s 2014 Skyscraper Competition, where it received an honorable mention. Their design places a high-speed rail station on top of a skyscraper, where trains would zoom down the sides of the building and shoot into underground tunnels to their destinations.
Each car would hold 10 people, seated in two rows that faced each other. Each terminal would have its own set of elevators, which would take you to a specific floor in a building that would be entirely for public use. Sounds insane, right? Except it could actually work—if we fixed a few small kinks.
In order to make sure passengers aren’t flung out of their seats to their deaths when the trains make the switch from vertical to horizontal, the train cars would have to be able to pivot the way Ferris Wheel seats do.
Ironically, the first Ferris Wheel used Pullman train cars, which absolutely did not pivot.
Getting around that little design quirk would not actually be that difficult, considering all of our recent technological advances. However, I doubt that we’ll see this built any time soon—the cost of such a project is sure to be astronomically high.
Source Discovery
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