A TRAIN travelling at 1,200 kilometres per hour (750mph) – just shy of the as-yet unbroken land-speed record and capable of breaking the sound barrier – will be able to carry passengers from Madrid to Barcelona in 30 minutes.
And it is expected to be on track in Spain within three to four years.
Known as a Hyperloop, the high-speed capsule is similar to Japan's bullet trains and uses very little energy despite the fact it would be able to get from Valencia to Madrid in little more than 20 minutes.
The brainchild of US business tycoon Elon Musk, who also created PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX – the latter two of which are involved in developing the capsule train – Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has 420 people from numerous multinationals in different countries working for the firm in exchange for a slice of its shares.
NASA, Boeing, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, Airbus, Harvard and Stanford Universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Spanish firm Next Limit Technologies all dedicate around 10 hours a week to Hyperloop.
Chief Executive Officer Dirk Ahlborn says a model of the Hyperloop has been tested over an eight-kilometre stretch in California's Quay Valley, and is ready to roll in Spain.
“At the end of 2014 we finished the feasibility study; we've got the technology, we're working on the licences, and next year we'll start building,” Ahlborn said at the recent business entrepreneurial summit XSpain.
The test-run in California is 'a prototype which works', the CEO revealed, and with which Hyperloop Transportation Technologies expect to move 10 million people a year with in Spain alone.
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