India's Minister for Railways recently announced that the country has completed part of a "hyperloop" track, Newsweek reported. The track will soon enter its testing phase and, if successful, could transport passengers between major cities at speeds of up to 683 mph.
The idea of a hyperloop — a train or pod contained within a tube that uses vacuum pressure to travel at previously unheard-of speeds for ground-based travel — was brought to the attention of the public by Tesla CEO and political activist Elon Musk.
Musk spent roughly a decade from 2012 to 2023 talking up the idea of a hyperloop but ultimately did not directly get involved in any formal projects outside of having Tesla and SpaceX engineers experimenting. The project most closely based on some of his ideas, Hyperloop One, went bankrupt at the end of 2023.
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Now, however, India, China, and Switzerland have all taken up the mantle and have their own versions of a hyperloop project in the works. China's version combines the hyperloop with magnetic levitation technology to reach speeds of up to 621 mph and is also still in its development phase.
According to Newsweek, India's hyperloop will "[allow] trains to navigate a frictionless environment," which sounds like maglev might also be involved, though that specific term was not mentioned.
Watch: Bharat's first Hyperloop test track (410 meters) completed.
— Ashwini Vaishnaw (@AshwiniVaishnaw) December 5, 2024
👍 Team Railways, IIT-Madras' Avishkar Hyperloop team and TuTr (incubated startup)
📍At IIT-M discovery campus, Thaiyur pic.twitter.com/jjMxkTdvAd
Minister for Railways Ashwini Vaishnaw (@AshwiniVaishnaw) posted the news of India's hyperloop on X (formerly Twitter, now owned by Musk), writing, "Watch: Bharat's first Hyperloop test track (410 meters) completed."
Though there isn't much to see in the accompanying video, which simply shows the exterior of a tube, we can hope there will be in the future. The data shows that trains are the most planet-friendly form of long-distance travel, creating less planet-overheating air pollution per passenger than cars or planes. The better train technology gets, the better it is for everyone.
Americans have largely been denied access to high-speed rail, but a few projects are in the works. If a viable new type of train emerges that can zip passengers around at the speed of an airplane, that may prove too good to resist, even for U.S. politicians.
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