There are hopes that hyperloop technology may soon make land travel as fast as flying, but its future is unclear
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” 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.