Europe opens a tunnel to test 1,000km/h high-speed trains

Europe's longest tunnel to test Hyperloop bullet train technology opened on March 27 in the Netherlands.

Located at a decommissioned railway hub near the city of Veendam in the northern Netherlands, the 420m long Y-shaped white tunnel consists of 34 interconnected pipes about 2.5m wide, according to AFP . Nearly all the air is sucked out of the tunnel to reduce drag, and vehicles inside are propelled by magnets at speeds that can reach 1,000km/h. Operators hope one day passengers will be able to travel from Amsterdam to Barcelona in two hours.

Hyperloop train technology test tunnel in the Netherlands. (Photo: AFP).

The European Hyperloop Center is the only facility in the world with a lane changer, a tunnel branch off the main track, allowing scientists to test what happens when vehicles change direction at high speeds. "You need to design like that to create a network. Lane changes are a branching part of the infrastructure, for example one branch goes to Paris, another branch leads to Berlin ," said center director Sascha Lamme. know. Lamme predicts a 10,000km Hyperloop tunnel network will run across Europe by 2050.

The Hardt Hyperloop company in the Netherlands plans to run preliminary tests of the vehicle in the coming weeks. The center is also open to companies developing any aspect of Hyperloop technology. However, the scientific community admits there is still a long way to go before the technology is completely ready and it is still far from being able to carry passengers. Full passenger operations will be available by 2030, possibly on short routes of around 5km, for example from the airport into the city.

Billionaire Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, was the first to propose the idea of ​​Hyperloop technology in a 2013 article proposing a "fifth means of transportation" connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. According to Musk, the Hyperloop tube can shorten the travel time between the two cities to about 30 minutes compared to 6 hours by road or one hour by plane. Since then, a number of companies around the world have developed ideas with research projects that cost millions of dollars, but Hyperloop technology has not yet become a reality.

British businessman Richard Branson once carried two passengers 500 meters across the Nevada desert in 2020, but his company Virgin Hyperloop, later renamed Hyperloop One, closed late last year. But research and testing is still going on around the world. China has a testing facility that allows them to reach speeds of nearly 700 km/h.

Supporters claim that Hyperloop technology does not pollute, does not create noise and blends in with the landscape in both urban and rural environments. According to Marinus Van der Meijs, director of technology and engineering at Hardt Hyperloop, the energy consumption of Hyperloop trains as a means of transportation is much lower than other types. It also requires less space to operate as the pipes can be easily installed underground or overhead.

Critics of the technology say Hyperloop is an unrealistic idea and have expressed doubts about passengers' experience of rushing through the narrow tube at speeds close to the speed of sound.