China launches world's fastest train that runs at the speed of 600 km per hour

Beijing, China (Urban Transport News): China has unveiled world's fastest maglev train which is capable to run at the top speed to 600 km per hour. China's train maker CRRC released the high-speed maglev train at a railway industry trade fair, InnoTrans 2022 in Berlin, Germany. According to the manufacturing company, the train is developed with indigenous technology developed by China. It said that the train prototype has already conducted a successful test run in China.

Since the 1980s, some commercial trains have employed magnetic levitation, or "maglev," which uses an electrified magnetic field to propel or pull objects at high speeds. Today, maglev trains are used in South Korea, China, and Japan.

China already has a running service for Maglev train in Shanghai that connects the main city with the airport. Maglev or Magnetic levitation use the electromagnetic force to literally “levitate” the whole train above the track with no physical contact between the rail and the body, which produce no friction. The train is levitated because of the strong force of repulsion between the poles of the magnets on the rail and those on the train’s body.

The maglev train is considerd as the World's fastest mode of high-speed transportation within the 1,500 km range in terms of actual travel time. A journey from Beijing to Shanghai takes about 2 hours by air, 5.5 hours by high-speed rail, and will only be about 2.5 hours by high-speed maglev train, taking journey preparation time into consideration.

Besides Maglev, China already has a network of 37,900 km of high-speed rail (HSR or bullet trains). It plan to almost double the network in the next 10 years.

Chinese researchers are working on maglev technology on cars as well. Recently researchers at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, Sichuan province, conducted a road testing for modified passenger cars that use magnets to float 35 millimetres above a conductor rail.The cars reached a top speed of 230 km per hour in the test run.