When it comes to high speed trains in America, the past few years have had some good news, and a whole lot of bad news as well. Acela, the name for Amtrak’s northeastern train line (the only train line in America that can even pretend to be high speed), connecting Boston to DC, recently announced a express line from New York City to D.C. Fast trains seem at long last to be picking up public attention in what was once an overshadowed sector of intercity transportation.

But none of these news stories can even hold a candle compared to the media attention and hype that the Hyperloop has commanded. For those of you who somehow managed to avoid it, the Hyperloop is a high speed brainchild of Tesla Founder Elon Musk. Essentially, it functions as a strangely designed high speed train within a vacuum tube. The tube allow the trains to go extremely fast, hypothetically up to 760 mph. This setup hopefully could revolutionize transportation between cities that are hundreds of miles apart and make commuting between them trivially fast. The oft-touted figure is that it would make a Los Angeles to San Francisco trek take less than 30 minutes total.

Needless to say, this has gotten the media hyped to levels that are unheard of in the transportation sector.

Entire companies have been started around creating their own version of Hyperloop with lofty promises and huge deals with governments around the world. India, UAE, and various American states have given these companies huge amounts of money to research and develop a hyper loop to connect their cities and regions together.

Unfortunately, little has been shown for it.  Contrary to popular belief, the Hyperloop hasn’t even been created yet. To this day, no one: no Hyperloop company, no student team, not even Elon Musk himself has developed anything approaching a working prototype. The entire Hyperloop concept still in the process of working out the many issues involved in implementation in real life. It’s just the things like like physics issues and aerodynamics that pose huge hurdles.

It may end up that Hyperloop, if it ever comes to fruition, may end up looking less like the revolutionary space-age transportation vision of the future, and more like an incremental improvement on the modern day high speed rail that we implemented see all over the world.

Unfortunately, although high speed rail is a proven technology that regularly achieves speeds of 250+ mph (and getting faster every few years). It’s even had records of 375 mph.  However, those speeds are not enough to dazzle the public and secure the much needed funding to make them a reality.

For the various Hyperloop projects, money and attention has come easy, but progress has been painfully slow. Competitions every year for new Hyperloop pod designs (the fancier way of saying train cars) seems to produce promising results for speed, but only if you ignore that the actual designs are too tiny to fit human passengers and the tube is not quite a vacuum as advertised. It wont take a lot of imagination to predict that as the Hyperloop designs inch closer and closer to reality, more and more compromises will have to be made. A speed reduction here, cost increase there, design fix here, etc. and suddenly these Hyperloops begin to resemble the next evolution of high speed rail that’s already in operation. If they in fact, become reality, they wont look anything like the lofty and futuristic designs and concepts promoted by the various Hyperloop companies, but instead pedestrian transportation infrastructure that already exists.

Is that really a problem then? Increasing funding for transportation infrastructure is not exactly the most seductive plan for government spending, so if Hyperloop encourages spending on trains that wouldn’t have been spent anyway, isn’t that a good thing? There’s a huge objection with that line of thinking. As Hyperloop sucks all the air out of the room when it comes to train transportation, there’s nothing left for anyone else. Governments and companies are so interested in achieving this Hyperloop nirvana, that they neglect to fund actual trains that can be constructed right here and now. For example, if a state spends 50 million to fund a potential Hyperloop that might not ever exist, that money could be flushed down the transportation toilet and sour the idea of spending any more money on trains altogether.

So, If I were involved in the transportation sector, I would be skeptical of Hyperloop, and focus instead on the solution that have the chance of actually seeing reality anytime soon.