Future of high-speed rail travel in Europe VIDEO
From endless queues to cancelled flights and lost luggage – if you've experienced any of the chaos plaguing European airports this summer, it might help to imagine a future in which international travel is smoother and doesn't revolve so much around flying.
Picture this: the year is 2045. You’re standing on a platform in Berlin awaiting a sleek Hyperloop pod that will glide into the station to a noiseless halt and then deposit you in Paris an hour later, ready for your morning meeting, Euronews reports.
In the afternoon, you’ll take another southbound pod on a leisurely trip to Barcelona for the weekend, a journey that will take no more than 90 minutes.
The speed and ease are no longer a surprise to you because in the last quarter-century, almost all travel throughout Europe has shifted from the skies to the ground.
Short-haul flights are nothing but a relic of a carbon-fuelled past.
It might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but there are real reasons to believe that a future of mobility like this could be possible.
The climate crisis is focusing the minds of European policymakers on their stated goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. Many are betting on the rail to get us there.
"If we want to achieve decarbonisation and the climate change targets, rail is the instrument to achieve it," Carlo Borghini, the head of Shift2Rail, the EU body responsible for driving research and innovation in the rail sector, told Euronews Next.
Trains already boast impressive green credentials when you factor in their high degree of electrification relative to other transport modes. As it stands, they’re responsible for a mere 0.5 per cent of carbon emissions within the EU.
Still, if Europe wants to cut transport-related emissions – which account for around a quarter of total EU greenhouse gas emissions – there is a long way to go in encouraging passengers and freight off aircraft and into train stations.
If there’s one thing that could lure passengers to trains, it’s likely the tantalising possibility of drastically reduced travel times between major European cities at zero emissions.
Companies like Nevomo in Poland and Zeleros in Spain are working towards making this a reality by developing respectively a hi-tech maglev rail system and a scalable Hyperloop system.
"Hyperloop is a new way of transport that basically reduces friction, which is the main source of inefficiency in transportation," said Juan Vicén Balaguer, the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Zeleros Hyperloop.
"The two main frictions are the aerodynamics: when the vehicle moves there is some resistance of the air. And the other one is the ground friction that happens when a wheel touches the ground," he explained.
"In order to avoid that. We put the vehicle in a tube where we eliminate most of the air and on the other side, we make the vehicle levitate so it doesn't touch any ground. We reduce the main friction and we can work with five to 10 times more energy efficient than an airplane".
The Hyperloop concept has its roots in the early 19th century when mechanical engineer George Medhurst first proposed a method of conveying people and goods using pneumatic tubes.
But it was Elon Musk who breathed new life into the idea when he released an open-source concept for a Hyperloop mass transit system in 2013.
In fact, Zeleros began as a university project competing in a Hyperloop Design competition hosted by Musk’s SpaceX in 2015, where they walked away with two awards for best design and best propulsion system.
Encouraged by their success, the team decided to go into business. They now boast a staff of over 150 people and are at the stage of testing the prototype they have developed.
The aim is to achieve speeds of 1,000 km at zero emissions.