Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the first commercial hyperloop project will be built on a track as long as 4,050 kilometers once the technology is fully tested.

IIT Madras, with help from the Ministry of Railways, has developed India’s first hyperloop test track. The track is 422 meters long and allows a high-speed train to travel inside a near-vacuum tube at speeds over 1,000 km/h.

IIT Madras, with support from the Ministry of Railways, has developed India’s first hyperloop test track. The track is 422 meters long and allows a high-speed train to travel in a near-vacuum tube at speeds of more than 1,000 km/h.

“Government-academia collaboration is driving innovation in futuristic transportation,” Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw wrote in a post on X.

The hyperloop track showed that you can travel about 350 km in just 30 minutes. This means that, if used in real life, people could travel from Delhi to Jaipur, which is about 300 km, in less than half an hour.

“The first pod of 422 meters will go a long way in developing technologies,” Vaishnaw said. “I think the time has come when, after the first two grants of a million dollars each, the third grant of one million dollars will be given to IIT Madras for further developing the hyperloop project.”

He also mentioned that Indian Railways will start the first commercial project once the technology is fully tested and ready.

“We’ll decide a site which can be used for good commercial transportation of let’s say some 4,050 kilometers,” he said.

The project, which involves trains potentially traveling at speeds up to Mach 1 inside special capsules in vacuum tubes, was funded by the Ministry of Railways and built at the IIT Madras campus.

For reference, Mach 1 is about 761 miles per hour or 1,224.71 kilometers per hour.

The reason these trains can reach such high speeds is that they will be part of an electromagnetically levitating pod inside a vacuum tube, which removes friction from traditional rails and air drag.