New York To Beijing In Two Hours??

When was the first time you learned about maglev trains? Most of us were quite young, and upon learning about it my first question was 'why isn't this everywhere?' 

Well a lot of factors came into play that I was just to young to understand, the biggest of all was money. It took money to design the system, it took money to build a working model, it also takes money to sell the idea to the rest of the world. But most of all a maglev system would be taking money from oil companies... after all if major transportation companies no longer needed airplanes, trains, trucks (etc) to run on expensive gasoline and diesel fuels, then oil companies would miss out on millions of dollars worth of fuel purchases. 

We all know that one day, there will be no more oil so we might as well start building the infrastructure for maglev systems now. One company, ET3, has some ideas on how to maximize the maglev industry and their ideas for ETT (evacuated tube transport) show some serious promise. 

According to ET3, a ETT system would be able to transport passengers from New York to Beijing inside of 2 hours! That statement is quite bold, but not unachievable. This is doable by placing passengers & cargo inside a maglev train which would travel inside evacuated tubes and accelerated using linear electric motors until the desired top speed is reached. 

Since the motors are integrated into the evacuated tube, the actual 'train' portion doesn't need to have any moving or electrically activated parts, thus lowering the over all complexity & cost of the trains. Additionally the efficiency of this system would be second to none, this is because the trains moving through the vacuum would not encounter any wind resistance impeding acceleration and the electricity needed to get the train up to speed would in turn be recaptured during the deceleration process.

This form of fast and inexpensive long distance travel is not only possible, it is something we should invest in today. For more information on ET3 and their ETT system please visit their website here.