China has built a prototype for a train that's 3 times faster than a plane

By utilizing the same design as Elon Musk's Hyperloop, Chinese engineers have developed the prototype of a train that can travel 1,800 miles per hour, three times the speed of a commercial airplane.

According to Chinese officials, the super maglev is the "future of train travel."  The concept was put forward by the Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University, and runs inside of a vaccuum tube so that it is unaffected by wind resistance.  The megathermal superconducting maglev loop was first tested in 2013.

If the theoretical speeds are reached, you could travel from Paris to Moscow in an hour.

 

The prototype is small (only 12 meters in diameter) but handles one of the initial problems of developing a ring line of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) maglev vehicle that can accelerate to 15 miles per hour.

According to D. Deng Zigang, "the second phase is to cover the ring line with an evacuation tube (ET), which is called the ET HTS Maglev.  The vehicle was designed to accelerate to a maximum speed of 50 kilometres (30 miles) per hour without passengers."  He explains that the speed of the prototype is limited by the diameter of the track.

 

Zigang operates the super maglev by remote control

 

Zigang points out that there are applications beyond land-based transportation, including launching vehicles into outer space.

 

http://www.sciencealert.com/news/20141905-25539.html

Image Credit: http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154

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