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At a workshop in Qingdao, engineers are putting China’s newest maglev train through its paces. The five-car train, sleek and blue-grey, glides along a short test track as technicians fine-tune every system to get performance just right. It’s the culmination of nearly two decades of work — and the last major hurdle before China’s 600 km/h maglev can move from prototype to reality.
The train rolled off the production line in July 2021. Now the priority is building a proper test line long enough to prove the system can run safely at full speed. Several provinces want the job. None has been chosen yet.
A century-old idea, engineered anew
Maglev technology dates back to 1922, when German engineer Hermann Kemper proposed the idea after noting that a train’s biggest source of drag was friction between wheel and rail. If a train could float above its track instead of rolling on it, he reasoned, it could go much faster. He patented the concept in 1934.
Germany and Japan pursued the technology from the 1960s onward, taking different approaches — Germany’s system uses electromagnetic attraction to keep trains levitated, while Japan’s relies on superconducting repulsion. Germany’s TR08 hit 450 km/h in testing back in 1999. Japan set a manned maglev speed record of 603 km/h on its Yamanashi test line in 2015, and is aiming to open its Chuo Shinkansen maglev line by 2027.
China entered the field with the Shanghai maglev, built with German technology and opened in 2002 — the world’s first commercially operating maglev line. It runs just 30 km, but reaches speeds of up to 430 km/h in service (501 km/h in tests). Riding it for the first time, one longtime Shanghai resident said, felt almost surreal: a train with no wheels, floating above the track.
That line became the foundation for China’s own maglev research. In 2016, the national government launched a major R&D program specifically targeting a 600 km/h system, backed by more than 3 billion yuan in central funding and over 30 billion yuan in total investment — the largest single project in China’s 13th Five-Year science and technology plan. More than 30 universities, research institutes and companies took part, led by state rail manufacturer CRRC.
The hard engineering problems
Getting a 300-tonne, five-car train to hover stably above a track at 600 km/h is an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem. The gap between train and track has to stay within about 10 millimeters, even as air turbulence and track irregularities try to throw it off. To crack this, the engineering team spent 13 months working around the clock — 14-hour days, more than 4,000 tests — before landing on a stable, fully domestic levitation and guidance system.
Aerodynamics posed another huge challenge. At 600 km/h, a train experiences roughly ten times the aerodynamic pressure of a 350 km/h high-speed train, and aerodynamic noise increases dramatically with speed. After more than 1,600 simulations and thousands of ground and track tests over five years, the team brought aerodynamic drag down by 17% and cut noise by 4 decibels, while also doubling the strength of the car body, achieving centimeter-level parking precision, and reaching millisecond-level response times for both the levitation system and train-to-ground communications.
How it stacks up
Chinese engineers say the new system addresses the obvious questions about a 600 km/h maglev:
- Safety: The train’s structure locks around the guideway, so derailment isn’t physically possible in the way it can be for wheeled trains. Electromagnetic exposure is reportedly lower than that of a household microwave.
- Noise: Because there’s no wheel-on-rail contact, noise 100 meters from the track at full speed stays within residential limits, and cabin noise is comparable to a commercial jet’s cabin during cruise.
- Energy use: Contrary to expectations, the system’s overall efficiency is on par with conventional high-speed rail. At 350 km/h, per-passenger energy use is similar to China’s Fuxing high-speed trains; even at 600 km/h, it’s estimated at roughly half of what flying the same distance would use.
Engineers argue the sweet spot for maglev is journeys up to about 1,500 km, where it beats both driving and flying on total door-to-door time. A Beijing-Shanghai maglev trip, for instance, could take around 3.5 hours including boarding — potentially linking China’s five biggest economic clusters within a 2,000 km radius in under four hours.
Why the Shanghai line won’t do
China already has one maglev line, so why not just test there? Engineers say it’s too short (30 km), too simple a route (no rivers or mountains to navigate), and built on foreign-supplied propulsion and control technology — while the new system needs a line long enough to validate China’s own domestically-developed propulsion, power supply, and control systems at true operating speed.
Cost is naturally a concern. But proponents point out that maglev trains have no wheel-rail contact and therefore far less wear — needing roughly a tenth of the maintenance staff that conventional rail requires. The Shanghai line, they note, has run for 20 years without a major overhaul.
The race for a test line
Several Chinese regions have floated proposals for a full-scale maglev corridor:
- Guangdong / Greater Bay Area, exploring a Shanghai–Shenzhen–Guangzhou corridor as part of its “rail-connected Bay Area” plans
- Zhejiang, which announced in April 2021 it would pursue a Shanghai–Hangzhou maglev link
- Chengdu–Chongqing, reserving corridor space for a 600–800 km/h maglev connection
- Anhui, studying a maglev line linking cities across the Shanghai–Hangzhou–Hefei “G60 innovation corridor,” targeting the 2021–2025 planning period
- Hainan, which considered maglev as an option for a Haikou–Sanya line
No route has been formally chosen. Experts say what’s needed now is a national-level decision to designate an actual test corridor — the final step before China’s 600 km/h maglev can move toward demonstration service and, eventually, commercial operation.
Where things stand
The train itself is built and tested: it rolled off the production line in July 2021 after passing more than 200 function tests on a shorter test track, and it’s currently undergoing full-system dynamic testing at CRRC’s Qingdao facility. What’s missing is a proper high-speed test line — the existing Shanghai maglev is too short and too simple a route to prove the system at 600 km/h, and it doesn’t use China’s own propulsion and control technology. Multiple regions — Guangdong, Zhejiang, Chengdu-Chongqing, Anhui and Hainan — have proposed routes, but Beijing hasn’t picked one. Until a national test corridor is approved and built, a Beijing-Shanghai run in 3.5 hours remains a demonstrated possibility rather than a scheduled reality.
