Europe’s longest hyperloop test track revives futuristic tube transport hype | Hyperloop
The longest hyperloop test track in Europe has opened, raising faint hopes once more that the maglev meets vacuum tube transport technology could be the future.
Operators said the facility would help prove the hyperloop’s feasibility, saying it could allow a 6,200-mile (10,000km) network of high-speed tubes to be in place around the continent by 2050.
As it stands, the European Hyperloop Center test bed in Veendam is not so much a loop as a 420-metre-long forked white pipe running alongside the railway and road that must still be used, for now, to transport people around this corner of the Netherlands.
Made of 34 interconnected prefabricated 2.5-metre-wide steel cylinders, the partly EU-funded test pipe is somewhat shorter than the 2-mile track envisaged in 2020, and allows speeds of only a fraction of the 620mph (1000km/h) that proponents believe the technology can achieve.
