There is a train in Japan that has already gone faster than six hundred kilometres an hour, and it has never sold a single ticket. So how fast will trains be in 1,000 years?

The second episode of our series "7 Levels of the Future": Nova jumps from that floating train in Japan to the absolute speed limit physics allows. A vacuum tube across the Atlantic, a train with no engine that falls through the planet, and a ring around the Earth where you'd weigh nothing.

???? WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
• How a real Japanese maglev already hit 603 km/h with passengers on board — and why the line built for it might not open until 2034 or later
• What a century-old vacuum-train sketch became when a Chinese test sled hit over 620 km/h inside a tube with no air
• Why the world's longest railway tunnel already runs under 2,450 meters of rock — and how a proposed tunnel in Norway would float instead of touching the seabed
• What a 1972 report proposed for crossing an entire continent in about 21 minutes
• How a train could cross the whole planet using zero fuel by simply falling — and why the trip always takes the same amount of time, no matter the route
• How a real physicist's design for a magnetic launch tube could fire a train straight into orbit
• What speed makes a train on a normal track weigh nothing — and why that exact number keeps showing up twice
• Why a British politician became a train's first famous victim, on its very first day in 1830

???? HOW THIS WAS MADE
The story, research, script and every editorial decision follow a fixed editorial standard; every fact is checked against a source before recording. The voice is AI text-to-speech; the drawings are generated from written scene descriptions and checked one by one. Where the video imagines the future, it says so.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
1:19 Level 1 · 2050: The Floating Train
3:58 Level 2 · 2100: Trains Without Air
6:47 Level 3 · 2200: Under the Sea
9:18 Level 4 · 2300: Across the Atlantic
11:45 Level 5 · 2500: Through the Earth
14:28 Level 6 · 3000: A Train to Space
16:46 Level 7 · The Edge: Around the World in 84 Minutes
19:14 Why Trains Keep Getting Faster

???? SOURCES

▸ LEVEL 1 · 2050: THE FLOATING TRAIN
In 2015, JR Central's SCMaglev set the world speed record for a train with people on board: 603 km/h (Guinness World Records, 2015): https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/fastest-maglev-train

Japan's Chūō Shinkansen maglev line is now delayed to 2034 or later, with costs doubled to about ¥11 trillion (Railway Gazette, 2026): https://www.railwaygazette.com/infrastructure/chuo-shinkansen-completion-delayed-until-2034/66398.article

▸ LEVEL 2 · 2100: TRAINS WITHOUT AIR
Elon Musk published the Hyperloop Alpha proposal for pods reaching 1,220 km/h in a low-pressure tube (Elon Musk / Tesla-SpaceX, 2013): https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf

China's CASIC tested a vacuum maglev sled that reached over 623 km/h in a 2 km tube (CASIC / New Atlas, 2024): https://newatlas.com/transport/china-vacuum-maglev/

▸ LEVEL 3 · 2200: UNDER THE SEA
Switzerland's Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world's longest railway tunnel, runs 57 km with up to 2,450 m of rock above it (AlpTransit Gotthard, 2016): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

▸ LEVEL 4 · 2300: ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
In 1972, RAND physicist Robert Salter proposed cross-country vacuum tunnels reaching over 20,000 km/h (Robert Salter / RAND Corporation, 1972): https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html

▸ LEVEL 5 · 2500: THROUGH THE EARTH
In 1966, physicist Paul Cooper calculated that a train falling through a straight tunnel through Earth would always take about 42 minutes (Paul Cooper / American Journal of Physics, 1966): https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-abstract/34/1/68/1041287

The Kola Superdeep Borehole reached 12,262 m before 180 °C rock heat stopped the drill in 1992 (Kola Superdeep Borehole project, 1992): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

▸ LEVEL 6 · 3000: A TRAIN TO SPACE
Physicists James Powell and George Maise proposed StarTram, a magnetic launch tube reaching 8.8 km/s exit speed (Powell & Maise, 2001): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram

▸ LEVEL 7 · THE EDGE: AROUND THE WORLD IN 84 MINUTES
At orbital speed, about 7.9 km/s, a train circling Earth's equator would complete one lap in about 84 minutes (Wikipedia, 2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit

▸ WHY TRAINS KEEP GETTING FASTER
Stephenson's Rocket won the 1829 Rainhill Trials with a top speed of about 48 km/h (National Railway Museum, 1829): https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/stephensons-rocket-rainhill-and-rise-locomotive

#futurehumans #futuretrains #7levels

Would you ride the train through the Earth? Yes or no.