hyper interest in hyperloop

It would have been hard recently to have escaped news updates on the Hyperloop, with reports of its first test, as well as talk of the Hyperloop coming to Europe.

The Minister of Infrastructure and the Environment in the country I am living in, the Netherlands, apparently being a "hyperloop enthusiast". Delft University will launch Europe's first test track.

Despite being quite a different kind of infrastructural set-up, the Hyperloop continues to be compared to pneumatic tube systems in much of this reporting. See for example, the Business Insider which traces the history of technologies which preceded the Hyperloop, and includes various different pneumatic tube systems.

Image used under CC lisence, from Wikimedia Commons.