Breaking 300 km/h on Shanghai's maglev

Davy has been talking about riding the Shanghai maglev (which he had heard about via youtube) for almost a year now and so it was super exciting to finally get on the fast train and check it out in person! The maglev was built as a collaboration between Germany and China between 2001 and 2004; it runs from Shanghai Pudong airport to Longyang metro station. It is a relatively short 8-minute hop during which we hit a top speed of 301 km/h. Maglev trains do this funky tilting thing in order to turn corners, which felt really smooth on board. Apparently they do some visual compensation as well, to enable as-normal-as-possible window-viewing at such high speeds.

After arriving at Longyang, we popped into the Maglev Museum located there to learn a bit more about the experience. We learned that the train currently holds a Guinness World Record and its top speed is supposed to exceed 430 km/h! However, it was also initially conceived to run all the way from Shanghai Pudong to Shanghai Hongqiao airports - this greater planned distance may have enabled a higher top speed. As far as we could tell, Longyang is the only destination at the present time (which is not surprising, given the rapid pace of expansion of pretty much everything in China, there are plenty of infrastructure projects lying around in a half-done state).Read more