Right now, taking a train from Boston to New York, a trip of about 186 miles, takes about five and a half hours. But what if you could cut that travel time down to, say, 45 minutes?
Making such ultra-high-speed travel possible is the goal of TransPod — a company with offices in Toronto, Canada; Limoges, France; and Dubai, United Arab Emirates — that recently introduced the FluxJet, a fully electric train that its makers claim can travel up to 1,000 kilometers per hour (621 miles per hour). FluxJet is being billed as a cross between a train and an airplane. Its passengers and cargo travel not in sleek train cars rolling along on rails but in 80-foot-long missile-like pods. The pods are magnetically levitated above the ground and propelled along a virtually frictionless “guideway” — essentially, a vacuum tube. TransPod has secured $550 million in funding to begin the first phase of a FluxPod link between Calgary and Edmonton, the two largest cities in the Western Canadian province of Alberta. The project cost is an estimated $18 billion and is expected to break ground for a test track in Edmonton in 2024.
The most obvious comparison to FluxJet is the Hyperloop, a high-speed solar-powered transport system touted in 2012 by Elon Musk. TransPod says FluxJet’s technology is based on a new branch of physics called veillance flux that will theoretically allow FluxJet to one-up what is now the world’s fastest commuter train, the Shanghai Transrapid Maglev Train, which links the Shanghai airport to the city’s financial district. That train’s top speed is a hair under 375 mph. Japan’s Shinkansen, commonly referred to as the “bullet train,” started operating in 1964 and boasts a top speed of just under 200 mph. The fastest train in the U.S. is Amtrak’s Acela train, which runs between Boston and Washington, D.C. Its top speed is 150 mph, and a one-way trip takes about seven hours. Compared to the FluxJet, it’s a tortoise.
For all its hype and years of research and development, FluxJet currently exists only as a scaled-down prototype with a sizable chunk of startup funding. Some skeptics predict it will suffer the same fate as several experimental hyperloop projects that have been launched to great fanfare but, so far, have yet to be deployed over long distances on a commercial scale. Still, Sebastien Gendron, TransPods’s co-founder and CEO, is optimistic that FluxJet will beat the odds. “All the hard work over the past few years has led to this milestone moment where talk is becoming reality,” he said in a news release. “The technology is proven, and we have the confidence of investors, governments, and partners to continue pushing forward to redefine transportation effectively.”
