> one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour.
Perhaps a stupid question, but the shock wave forms because the trains is moving continuously over the ground? So if you put the entire thing on stilts, there would be one wave formed at t0, x0 when the train reaches pylon 0 and the next wave would be at t1, x1 etc. So the interference pattern for the waves would look vastly different. ( This holds of course only for point like trains... )
Yes, rather than a line-source, you have multiple incoherent point sources, but those point sources are being excited along a line at a rate faster than the shear wave speed. So yes, it somewhat different, but also similar.
A test segment would go a long way to determining if/how much of a problem this might be in a hyperloop system.
Perhaps a stupid question, but the shock wave forms because the trains is moving continuously over the ground? So if you put the entire thing on stilts, there would be one wave formed at t0, x0 when the train reaches pylon 0 and the next wave would be at t1, x1 etc. So the interference pattern for the waves would look vastly different. ( This holds of course only for point like trains... )