La China continues to revolutionise the transport sector, particularly the railways, with its new plan to run trains at 1000 km/h by 2035three times faster than our TGVs in France. It is based on magnetic levitation technology of the maglev Japan's high-powered magnets, and building on the advances made in recent years in the Hyperloop pioneered by American billionaire Elon Musk. However, these were gradually abandoned in view of the technological challenge and the colossal financial investments required to build the tubes and the trains or capsules travelling in these low-pressure tubes, which would eliminate all resistance to the wind.
Beijing and Shanghai in 1h30
Last February, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) successfully completed an initial series of tests with the T-Flight, reaching speeds of 623 km/h over a distance of 2 km with an ultra-high-speed maglev train (UHS) launched in a Hyperloop-type vacuum tube. During the initial tests, the T-Flight reached the impressive speed of 623 km/h over a distance of 2 km. All that remains now is to take the plunge and build the first line - doubling the existing high-speed train service - and settle the questions of funding, safety, regulation and technology. And in particular to offer the wifi This is already a complicated task at 320 kph. Several major Chinese cities are already in line to be among the first to benefit from this innovation. First of all Beijing and Shanghai, which would be linked in around 1 hour 30 minutes, compared with 4 hours 30 minutes by high-speed train and 2 hours by plane. Other routes being considered include Beijing-Shijiazhuang and Guangzhou-Shenzhen.
Hyperloop as a booster
The idea of levitating trains rather than running them on rails goes back a long way. This futuristic project was practically invented by a Frenchman, Jean Bertin, who worked on the technique in the 1960s and built a test line near Orléans on concrete pillars in the early 1970s. Costly, theAerotrain was finally abandoned in favour of the TGVinaugurated between Paris and Lyon in 1981. It was in the 1960s that Japan Railway also began work on its Maglev, with the dream of running trains between Tokyo and Osaka in 1 hour. More than sixty years later, the first commercial Shinkansen Chūō line should see the light of day in 2027, between Tokyo and Nagoya. In the meantime, however, the Maglev exceeded 600 km/h during tests carried out in 2015. It was in 2013 that Elon Musk entered the dance by pushing ahead with research for the Californian company Hyperloop, exasperated by the traffic jams that existed between his home and his office. Working openly with a variety of financial partnerships, several research centres were set up in major industrialised countries, swallowing up hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Until France in Toulouse, where Hyperloop has built a test tube on the former Toulouse Francaval military base, before everything comes to a halt in 2021. However, research is still being carried out in Italy and especially in the Netherlands by the Hardt Hyperloop company. The Chinese now intend to combine the best of both worlds to reach speeds of 1,000 km/h.
