BERLIN, GERMANY (Metro Rail News): China has introduced the world’s fastest train, the maglev, which is capable to attain a top speed of 600 km/h. The high-speed train was unveiled by China’s train maker CRRC during a trade fair for the railway sector in Berlin, Germany. The manufacturing company claims that China’s indigenous technology was used to develop the train. It claimed that a successful test run of the train prototype had already been conducted in China.
Since the 1980s, some commercial trains have used magnetic levitation, or “maglev,” which accelerates or pulls objects using an electrified magnetic field. Nowadays, South Korea, China, and Japan all use maglev trains.
Shanghai in China already has a functional Maglev train service that links the main city with the airport. Maglev or Magnetic levitation uses 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 magnets on the track and those on the train’s body repel one another with a powerful force, which causes the train to be levitated.
Besides Maglev, China already has a network of 37,900 km of high-speed rail (HSR or bullet trains). Its plans to almost double the network in the next 10 years.
Chinese researchers are working on automotive maglev technology as well. Recent road tests for modified passenger cars that use magnets to float 35 millimeters above a conductor rail were done by researchers at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.
