For about a decade, the hyperloop has been shorthand for technology that sounds incredible in a slide deck and never quite shows up at the station. Elon Musk floated the idea in a 2013 white paper, built one short test tube in the desert, and handed the dream off to startups that mostly burned through cash and went quiet.<\/p>\n
Virgin Hyperloop, the best-funded of the lot, shut its doors in 2023 after raising more than $450 million. So if you had filed “a train that beats an airplane by floating through a vacuum” under things that are never actually going to exist, you were in reasonable company.<\/p>\n
Then there is China, where a state-owned company that builds missiles for a living has been running a real one. The T-Flight, developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation<\/a> (CASIC), has been clocked at more than 387 mph (623 km\/h) inside a sealed, nearly airless tube in northern China, per New Atlas.<\/p>\n That makes it, by CASIC’s own numbers, the fastest a magnetically levitated vehicle has ever traveled. And the company is not treating 387 mph as the finish line. It is treating it as the warm-up.<\/p>\n The hardware is real, and it is oddly specific. CASIC, working with the Shanxi provincial government, built a 2 km (1.2-mile) run of low-vacuum tube in Yanggao county, near Datong in Shanxi province. As far as anyone can tell, it is the longest facility of its kind anywhere on the planet. This is not a scale model or a render. It is a full-diameter pipe with a vehicle inside it that goes very fast.<\/p>\n “Low vacuum,” here, means the air pressure inside the tube sits somewhere between 0.3 and 0.001 bar, against the roughly 1 bar you are breathing at sea level. You do not need to pull out every last molecule. You just need to thin the air enough that it stops mattering. The numbers CASIC has released around the tube are the part that should make you sit up.<\/p>\n The track surface is flattened to within a tolerance of 0.3 mm, about a third of a millimeter. The 6 m (20-foot) diameter tube has a geometric size error of less than 2 mm. The whole pipeline can be brought back to normal pressure within five minutes.<\/p>\n Building something straight enough that a 387-mph vehicle does not get thrown around takes a level of precision most civil engineering never has to think about, mostly because most civil engineering is not trying to fling a pod through a steel straw.<\/p>\n For a sense of how far ahead this is, the previous benchmark for the fastest maglev run belongs to Japan’s L0 Series SCMaglev, which hit 375 mph (603 km\/h) back in 2015 with people on board.<\/p>\n According to Railway News<\/a>, that 603 km\/h mark still stands as the official record. CASIC’s 387 mph number edges past it on paper, but the Japanese run carried passengers in the open air, while the Chinese figure came from a prototype in a vacuum tube. Those are not the same achievement, and it is worth keeping that straight before anyone declares the record dead.<\/p>\n Here is why the tube exists at all. A maglev train already does away with the biggest drag on a normal train, which is the wheels. Powerful magnets lift the vehicle a small distance off its guideway and push it forward, so there is no metal-on-metal friction to fight. That alone gets you to serious speed.<\/p>\n China’s Shanghai Maglev has been carrying paying passengers at around 268 mph (431 km\/h) since 2004, and it does it on wheels-free magnetic suspension in open air.<\/p>\n The catch is that once you pass roughly 250 mph, the thing you are mostly fighting is the air in front of you. Aerodynamic drag climbs steeply with speed, and it is the wall that keeps open-air maglev parked somewhere around 600 to 700 km\/h no matter how strong your magnets are. The vacuum tube is the way around it.<\/p>\n Pull most of the air out of the path, and the vehicle stops slamming into an invisible cushion every second. Combine no wheel friction with almost no air resistance, and the ceiling jumps well past anything that rolls or flies low. If a train floating through a near-empty tube still sounds made up, it keeps good company with a 28-ton kite that flies underwater to generate electricity<\/a>, which is also real and currently feeding a grid in the Faroe Islands.<\/p>\n That is the whole reason for the next phase. CASIC wants to extend the test track thirtyfold, from 2 km to 60 km (37 miles), which is the distance it needs to actually push the T-Flight to its design speed of 621 mph (1,000 km\/h). At 621 mph, it would not just be the fastest train on Earth.<\/p>\n It would be quicker than the jet you would otherwise have flown, since a typical airliner cruises around 560 mph (900 km\/h). The 387 mph already on the board makes it the fastest train. The 621 mph target is the number that lets it beat the plane.<\/p>\n The T-Flight is not the only ultra-fast maglev project China has running, and in December a different group made the more eye-watering headline. On December 25, state broadcaster CCTV aired footage of researchers from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) accelerating a one-ton test vehicle from a standstill to 700 km\/h (435 mph) in roughly two seconds, then bringing it to a safe stop, all on a 400 m (1,310-foot) track.<\/p>\n The team, which is separate from CASIC’s program, called it the fastest superconducting electric maglev run of its kind in the world, according to China’s state broadcaster CGTN<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now, you are not going to ride that one. Going 0 to 435 mph in two seconds means pulling around 10 g on the way up, which is past the point where a trained fighter pilot blacks out, and the footage shows a bare chassis leaving a trail of mist, not a carriage with seats.<\/p>\n It is a propulsion test, built to prove the magnets and the power electronics can hurl a heavy object that hard and still stop it on a short track.<\/p>\n The hardware leans on high-temperature superconducting magnets, which is a generous use of the word “high,” since they run in liquid nitrogen at around minus 196 degrees Celsius rather than the much colder liquid helium older superconductors need.<\/p>\n What the run actually shows is muscle. “The successful development of this ultra-high-speed superconducting electric maglev system will accelerate the research and development process of China’s ultra-high-speed maglev transport,” NUDT professor Li Jie told CCTV.<\/p>\n The same electromagnetic kick that flung a sled down a 400 m track is the kind of force you would eventually need to get a loaded passenger vehicle to 1,000 km\/h, and the team has said the technology could also help launch rockets and assist aircraft takeoffs.<\/p>\n Different project, same underlying bet, which is that China can keep pushing this curve faster than anyone else is bothering to.<\/p>\n Speed is the part that grabs headlines. Whether a human can sit through it is the part that decides if any of this becomes transport, and until recently the honest answer was not encouraging. Above roughly 600 km\/h (373 mph), earlier vacuum-tube prototypes produced violent oscillations that engineers described as physically intolerable.<\/p>\n Newsweek<\/a> reported in 2025 that scientists at the Shanxi vacuum facility say they have developed a suspension system that sharply reduces those vibrations, which is the unglamorous engineering that has to work before a paying passenger ever climbs aboard.<\/p>\n This is the gap between a record and a railway, and it is the same gap worth remembering whenever a transport number sounds too clean. A hydrogen commuter train recently ran 1,742 miles on a single tank<\/a> in testing, then went into actual service covering nine miles each way, and both figures were true. The lab number is the flex.<\/p>\n The service number is the one that holds up under real heat, real stops, and real passengers. The T-Flight’s 387 mph is genuinely impressive, and the suspension work is genuinely necessary, but neither one is a ticket you can buy yet.<\/p>\n So where does that leave the world’s fastest train? With a very real prototype, a very real 2 km tube, and a long list of things that have not happened. The 60 km extension the 621 mph target depends on does not exist yet, and laying 35 more miles of perfectly straight, airtight, vacuum-pumped tube is the kind of project that makes a normal high-speed rail budget look quaint.<\/p>\n CASIC has sketched a future Datong-to-Beijing link that would turn a 215-mile, four-hour-plus drive into a sub-30-minute ride, plus a much wilder promotional vision of a Wuhan-to-Beijing line at 2,000 km\/h. The first is plausible engineering. The second is a corporate video.<\/p>\n It also helps to remember the company name on the project. CASIC’s day job is missiles and spacecraft, not commuter rail, and a state contractor that size does not have to sweat quarterly returns or landowner complaints the way a Western startup did right before it folded. The contrast with how this is going in the US is hard to miss.<\/p>\nThe hyperloop everyone gave up on is parked in a Shanxi field<\/h2>\n
Take the air out and the train stops fighting itself<\/h2>\n
Then a second Chinese team flung a sled to 435 mph in two seconds<\/h2>\n
The ride used to be unbearable above 373 mph<\/h2>\n
What is missing is 35 miles of tube and a passenger who can survive it<\/h2>\n