Even with potholes, West Virginia is still known for its transportation innovations — and transportation innovators.
Those Personal Rapid Transit cars, for example.
Pre-COVID, they were constantly traversing WVU’s downtown and Evansdale campuses, getting students to and from.
And Lincoln County’s Chuck Yeager before that, was the test pilot who broke the sound barrier and opened the portal to America’s space program.
Now, you can add Sir Richard Branson to that list.
The British billionaire and entrepreneur announced Thursday he’s building a testing center in the Mountain State for a high-speed train system he says will someday whisk passengers from New York to Washington, D.C., in 30 minutes.
Branson likened the news to the first leg of a journey — “For West Virginia, for the United States and for the world,” he said.
Virgin Hyperloop One will be housed on 800 acres in Tucker and Grant counties.
Plans include the addition of a 6-mile track, so the futuristic-looking pods, carrying those passengers through pressurized tubes, can get some real-world geography of dips and swoops — opposed to a flat, straight trajectory on an antiseptic site.
The land, owned by Western Pocahontas Properties and located near Mount Storm, is being donated to the WVU Foundation in partnership with the company, the university said.
WVU and Marshall University will partner in the project, which is expected to transport about $48 million annually to the state’s economy.
Almost heaven —definitely hyperloop
The infusion, Gov. Jim Justice said, will get a state that is still reeling from coal’s downturn back on the rails.
“For years, I have been saying that West Virginia is the best kept secret on the East Coast, and it’s true,” the governor said.
“Just look at this announcement and all it will bring to our state — investment, jobs and tremendous growth,” he continued.
“When we approached Virgin Hyperloop, I told them that we would do everything we could to bring this opportunity to West Virginia.”
The company will generate around 200 jobs, many of them engineering and technical positions, the company said.
That’s not counting thousands of construction jobs necessary during the building phase, said Kristin Hammer, a lead engineer with the
company.
Work is expected to begin next year on the Hyperloop campus, where pods will also be built.
Thursday’s announcement pulled into the station with lots of praise from college administrators, lawmakers in West Virginia and Washington and others charged with moving the state forward.
Justice was especially heartened, he said, because West Virginia won out over others also courting the project.
Delaware, Georgia, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, were also considered, the company said in a release –— along with Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Washington state.
High speeds and quick admittance
But while the Hyperloop pods can be built, can they provide the speeds engineers are saying they can?
During basic tests last year, the pods were notching 245 mph on a small-scale test track in Las Vegas, the company said, with the hope of eventually hitting 600 mph, or even 700 mph.
The pods safely whiz along at near silent-running, the company said, thanks to a magnetic system that allows them to “levitate” off the rails, similar to high-speed bullet trains in Japan and Europe.
Ryan Kelly, Virgin Hyperloop’s vice president of marketing and communications, said the idea is to make those pod-rides as affordable as possible, so everyone can take advantage — even with Branson’s marquee name involved.
“It won’t be like somebody’s private jet,” he said.
Before Branson, the company, he said, had an origin story most befitting a tech startup in America.
It began in a garage in Los Angeles, he said.
