Hyperloop One Announces Plans to Connect All of Europe

Hyperloop One wants to connect the entire world with trains that can reach speeds upwards of 700 mph. Today, the company made another step toward that goal with the announcement of potential routes across the European continent.

The transportation startup announced in Amsterdam on Tuesday a series of nine routes in Europe that it could eventually develop. “Our vision is to, one day, connect all of Europe with our Hyperloop One system, networking the entire continent,” said Shervin Pishevar, Hyperloop One’s co-founder and executive chairman. Today’s proposed series joins another 11 potential routes within the U.S. that the company announced earlier this year.

Those European routes were semifinalists in the company’s Global Challenge program, an endeavor to identify regions and cities that would be especially conducive to a hyperloop. Those proposed routes could eventually connect over 75 million people in around 44 cities across a span of 3,100 miles, according to CNBC. They include a circular route around Germany, another in the U.K. that would stretch from London to Glasgow, and even one that could run from Madrid, Spain to Tangier, Morocco in Northern Africa.

Hyperloop One has certainly caused a stir with its recent plans, and the company is arguably already one step ahead of chief competitor Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. Despite that, the company has yet to perform any full-scale tests of its technology — though H1 is planning a test run north of Las Vegas later this year, an event which it hopes will turn out to be its “Kitty Hawk” moment.

The hyperloop concept itself was first envisioned by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk several years ago. Musk proposed that the hyperloop could connect cities via ultrafast trains that are magnetically levitated within pneumatic tubes. But rather than embark on the idea himself, Musk and SpaceX released an open-source paper in 2013 in the hope that others would take up the mantle and make it a reality.