London to Paris in 20 minutes? This futuristic rail project is trying to make it a reality

Pods might one day hurtle between cities at hundreds of miles an hour through hyperloop vacuums

Fluorescent lights guide me along the cold, dark tunnel as a hard hat wobbles on my head. I stare at the wires and steel strips lining the walls, then set off towards the black void at the end.

I’m at the European Hyperloop Center Veendam. This small industrial town in the far north of the Netherlands has become an unlikely proving ground for a technology that promises to revolutionise how we travel.

“To think that we could be having coffee in Paris in under an hour from now is a huge mindset shift,” says Kees Mark, the centre’s cheerful managing director as we disappear down the giant metal tube. The 300-mile journey from Paris to Amsterdam, for instance, currently takes over three hours by train.

Hyperloop technology promises vacuum tube travel at speeds of over 600mph - Ronnie Zeemering

“Hyperloop” has been an engineering pipe dream for decades, but it gained traction after Elon Musk published a white paper on the concept in 2013. Promising vacuum tube travel at speeds north of 600mph – making London to Paris doable in under half an hour – hyperloop’s cheerleaders claim the technology will fundamentally recalibrate how we evaluate distance, influencing everything from house prices to where we choose to go for our next city break. Others aren’t so sure.

Cracking the conundrum

Much of the early groundwork on hyperloop happened in the US. However, after conducting the world’s first passenger test in Nevada, the Los Angeles-based Virgin Hyperloop folded in 2023 amid spiralling costs. The once-promised near future of intercity travel looked to be dead in the desert, a dusty totem of tech-bro hubris.

The European Union, however, has doggedly ploughed on. In 2024, it opened the European Hyperloop Center Veendam, complete with a roughly quarter-mile test track that runs, symbolically, alongside a railway line.

In fact, it’s not technically a track. The pods tested here do not run on rails, but are suspended in midair by magnets in the roof of the vehicles. Similar technology is used on maglev trains.

“It’s more like flying,” says Mark, his voice echoing off the walls. “That’s one of the benefits of hyperloop – there’s no wear from moving parts.”

Until recently, the lack of moving parts was also a drawback. Without physical infrastructure to guide the pods, how can they switch lanes? That question has long dogged hyperloop, which is limited as a transport system if it can only get from A to Z: people need to peel off and visit the places in between, too.

That conundrum was cracked in December. In this very tunnel – the only test site in the world that splits into two – engineers pulled off a “zero-moving-parts lane switch”, albeit at just 55mph.

“It’s a big deal,” says Mark, as we stand at the junction where it happened.

The feat was achieved by selectively energising the pod’s guidance magnets, forcing it to switch lanes. Mark believes it was a “turning point” for hyperloop – and he’s not alone.

“Everything up to that point is Stephenson-grade technology – everything beyond it is radically different,” coos Alan James, the former vice president for business development at Virgin Hyperloop, who was not involved in the test and speaks to me later over Zoom. “This is the genesis technology of next-generation transport networking. I cannot overstress the significance of it.”

Hyperloop hurdles

The lane switch was accomplished by Hardt, a Dutch hyperloop company that launched after its founders won a Musk-led engineering competition to develop the concept.

From a technical point of view, the lane switch is “a big and important hurdle”, says Hardt’s co-founder Tim Houter, speaking to me later in Rotterdam. “But it’s not the only one”.

Maintaining a vacuum inside leak-prone pipes, which expand as temperatures rise, is another major challenge – albeit one that Chinese engineers claim to have cracked with specially-designed steel-concrete tubes.

Houter is confident that tech challenges are solvable, but other obstacles remain. “Financing is at least as big of a hurdle,” he says.

An aerial view of the hyperloop testing centre in the Netherlands

Hyperloop is stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation, he adds. Huge investment is required to build a line long enough to showcase the technology and establish a safety record. But who’s going to risk the investment, let alone the political capital, in backing such a project?

While hyperloop projects have been planned in the United Arab Emirates, India and Italy, China may yet beat everyone else to it. In December, researchers at its National University of Defense Technology got a levitating vehicle to accelerate from 0-435mph in two seconds.

China also has a 1.2-mile hyperloop test track of its own in Shanxi province and is a leader in developing maglev trains – widely seen as a precursor to hyperloop.

Counting the cost

Predictably, hyperloop’s projected costs are the source of much debate. “The infrastructure is comparable to high-speed rail, but operating costs are much lower because it’s much more energy efficient,” says Mark. “In most modes of travel, 85 per cent of energy consumption is used to overcome air resistance. You don’t have that in a vacuum.”

Critics are not convinced. “The capacity of moving people will be much lower,” says Dr Robert Noland, director of the Alan M Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University in the US. “Currently, the capsules are smaller than a train.”

Students get an up-close look at the hyperloop tube in Veendam - AFP

Significantly smaller, in fact. The first pod certified for carrying passengers in Europe – developed by the Technical University of Munich – carries just five people, and there’s no loo.

This lack of capacity will keep fares high, says Noland, who reckons the money being sunk into hyperloop would be better spent improving existing infrastructure.

Mark disagrees. The holy grail of hyperloop, he says, is to have hundreds of autonomous pods darting around, responding to real-time demand rather than adhering to timetables. For that to be possible, each pod must know the others’ locations and be able to communicate with them.

He points to the continuous line of barcodes running horizontally along the walls. “The pods scan these as they travel so we know exactly where they are,” he says. “That’s essential from an operational perspective and a safety point of view.”

We emerge ourselves from the tunnel, into the cold light of day. A train rattles by on the nearby line. “Old-fashioned travel,” jokes Mark.

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