Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw inspected the Hyperloop test track at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in Tamil Nadu’s Chennai on Saturday, March 15, 2025.
While interacting with mediapersons, the Union Minister explained how the project will function. He was standing in front of the tube, which will function as the ‘track’ for the Hyperloop pods to operate on.
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“Hyperloop is basically like a tube…There will be a vacuum inside the tube and the pod which will operate inside the tube will operate in a ‘levitation’ mode,” Vaishnaw said.
Explaining what he means by the ‘levitation’ mode, the BJP leader said, “There will be magnetic fields which raise the pod over the tracks. [The pod] does not move on the track. It basically goes up, then moves. That is the principle of hyperloop.”
He went on to call the pod the “transporting mechanism” and the tube the “transportation medium”.
He stated that the Hyperloop project at IIT Madras is currently at an experimental stage but “very good results are visible now”. “Maybe in a few years from now, we should have a good working model,” he said.
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He also announced that the entire electronics of the Avishkar Hyperloop will be developed at the Integrated Coach Factory in Chennai. “ICF Chennai has a very strong electronics team because they are developing very large electronics for Vande Bharat and many other trainsets and engines. So they’re capable of designing new, smaller electronics which are required for this pod,” he said.
What is Hyperloop?
Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, unveiled the idea of Hyperloop to the World through a White Paper – Hyperloop Alpha. It is the fifth mode of transportation that moves freight and people quickly, safely and directly from the origin to destination.
Passengers or cargos are loaded into the Hyperloop pod and accelerated gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube. The proposed Hyperloop model can achieve a top speed of over 1,200 kmph.
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It is completely autonomous, safe, clean and enclosed. More importantly, Hyperloop is environment friendly and doesn’t call for much maintenance too.
Hyperloop has been “open-sourced” by Elon Musk and SpaceX to attract innovations and improvements in the concept, thus optimising the technology and bringing out the better version of itself.