As of 2026, about half a dozen maglev lines carry passengers: one high-speed line, the Shanghai Transrapid (30 km, airport to Longyang Road, capped at 300 km/h since 2021 after 17 years at 431 km/h), and a group of slower urban lines topping out at 100 to 160 km/h in Nagoya, Changsha, Beijing and Fenghuang, plus a revived airport line at Incheon. They work by holding the train 1 to 10 centimetres off its guideway with magnets, either pulling it up from below (EMS) or pushing it up with superconducting coils (EDS), so nothing rolls and nothing touches.
Japan holds the speed record, 603 km/h, set by an L0 Series train on 21 April 2015, and it is building the only intercity maglev in the world, the Chuo Shinkansen between Tokyo and Nagoya. That project has slipped well past its original 2027 opening. The rest is short lines, closures and prototypes, which is why a technology patented by Hermann Kemper in 1934 still runs on so little track.
How a Train Floats: EMS Versus EDS
Every maglev does three jobs with magnets: it lifts the vehicle, keeps it centred, and pushes it forward. Propulsion comes from a linear motor, an electric motor unrolled flat along the guideway: coils in the track switch on in sequence and drag the train along. The guideway is the motor.
Lift is where the two families differ.
- Electromagnetic suspension (EMS) wraps the vehicle's underside around a steel rail. Electromagnets on the train sit below the rail and attract upward toward it. That attraction is unstable, so sensors measure the gap many thousands of times a second and adjust the current. The German Transrapid holds a nominal gap of about 10 mm this way. EMS levitates at a standstill, which makes it suitable for slow urban lines that stop every kilometre or so.
- Electrodynamic suspension (EDS) uses repulsion instead. Japan's SCMaglev carries superconducting niobium-titanium coils cooled to about minus 269 °C with liquid helium. As those powerful magnets sweep past coils in the guideway walls, they induce currents that push back, lifting the train roughly 10 cm. The arrangement is naturally stable and tolerates a far bigger gap, which matters in earthquakes. The catch is that induction only works when the train is moving: below a speed of about 100 to 150 km/h the L0 runs on rubber tyres, retracting them like an aircraft's landing gear once it lifts off.
Shanghai's Transrapid: From 431 km/h to 300 km/h
The Shanghai Maglev runs from Longyang Road station, on Metro Line 2 in Pudong, to Pudong International Airport. Its route is usually given as 30 km (29.86 km between stations in the official figure), all of it on an elevated concrete guideway. The trains are Transrapid SMT sets built by a Siemens and ThyssenKrupp joint venture, and the whole system cost about 10 billion yuan, around US$1.2 billion at the time.
A preview service ran on 31 December 2002, revenue service started on 10 October 2003, and full commercial operation is usually dated to 2004. During testing on 12 November 2003 a set reached 501 km/h, still a Chinese record for a train. For most of its life the line cruised at 431 km/h, covering the distance in 7 minutes 20 seconds, and for those years it was the fastest scheduled train on Earth.
That ended in May 2021, when the operator capped running at 300 km/h. Reports blame energy costs and ageing equipment; no plan to restore the old speed has been published as of 2026. The trip now takes about 8 minutes; a one-way ticket costs ¥50.
Shanghai is also a cautionary tale. Early ridership ran at about 20% of capacity, partly because Longyang Road is far from the centre, and an extension to Hangzhou was shelved after residents protested. The line never grew into a network. Shanghai itself is covered in more depth in our guide to Shanghai's geography.
Japan's Chuo Shinkansen and the 603 km/h Record
An unmanned ML-500 test vehicle passed 500 km/h at Miyazaki in 1979, and the work later moved to a test track in Yamanashi Prefecture, extended in 2013 to 42.8 km. On that track, on 21 April 2015, a seven-car L0 Series train carrying crew reached 603 km/h, the fastest any rail vehicle has travelled.
The Yamanashi track is designed to become part of the Chuo Shinkansen, a 285.6 km line from Shinagawa in Tokyo to Nagoya. At a planned 500 km/h it would take about 40 minutes, against roughly 1 hour 35 minutes on today's fastest Tokaido Shinkansen. Around 86 to 90% of the route runs in tunnels, including a long bore under the Southern Alps. JR Central's cost estimate has climbed past ¥9 trillion (around US$57 billion), up from ¥5.1 trillion in 2007.
The delay comes from Shizuoka Prefecture. The route crosses only about 9 km of it, but in 2020 the prefecture refused permission to start the tunnel, arguing that it could drain water from the headwaters of the Ōi River. JR Central conceded the 2027 target was out of reach. Governor Heita Kawakatsu resigned in April 2024, and his successor, Yasutomo Suzuki, has been more cooperative, but tunnelling there started years late. Current estimates put the Tokyo to Nagoya opening no earlier than 2034 to 2036. The extension to Osaka, which would bring Tokyo to Osaka down to about 67 minutes, is now targeted for as early as 2037.
The conventional bullet trains this line is meant to relieve are described in our Shinkansen guide.
The Slow Maglevs: Nagoya, Incheon, Changsha, Beijing and Fenghuang
Every other maglev in service is slow. Low-speed EMS lines appeal to planners because they are quiet and have few moving parts to wear out.
- Linimo, Aichi (2005). Japan's HSST technology, opened for the 2005 World Expo east of Nagoya. It runs about 8.9 km with nine stations at up to 100 km/h, and it is the oldest maglev still in public service.
- Incheon Airport Maglev, South Korea (2016). A 6.1 km line with six stations and a 110 km/h design speed, built with Korean technology. It was suspended in 2022 and has since been brought back as a tourist ride rather than a transport link.
- Changsha Maglev Express, Hunan (2016). 18.55 km from Changsha Huanghua International Airport to Changsha South railway station, the busiest of the slow lines. Newer trains run at 140 km/h.
- Beijing Line S1 (2017). About 10 km in Beijing's western suburbs, running at up to 100 km/h on technology from the National University of Defense Technology.
- Fenghuang, Hunan (2022). A 9.12 km tourist line serving the old town of Fenghuang, also at about 100 km/h.
China's CRRC has gone further and built a 600 km/h EMS prototype, unveiled in Qingdao in July 2021. It has no line yet.
Lines That Closed: Birmingham, Berlin, Emsland and Daejeon
The world's first commercial maglev was a 600 m people-mover between Birmingham Airport and Birmingham International railway station, opened on 16 August 1984. Its cars took 90 seconds for the trip. Spare parts became impossible to source and it closed on 18 June 1995; the guideway now carries a cable-hauled shuttle.
A claim often repeated, including on earlier versions of this page, is that the first manned maglev ran at Hamburg in 1979. It did not. The Transrapid 05 did carry more than 50,000 visitors on a 908 m track at the IVA 79 transport fair in Hamburg, but people had already ridden maglevs in Germany: MBB's Prinzipfahrzeug carried passengers on a 660 m test track in 1971, and the HMB2 did so in 1976.
West Berlin's M-Bahn opened 1.6 km of track with three stations along a disused U-Bahn alignment. It ran free trial services from August 1989 and entered regular service on 18 July 1991, only to close on 31 July 1991. The fall of the Wall meant the old U2 line had to be reconnected through its route.
The worst moment in maglev history came at the 31.5 km Emsland test track near Lathen, Germany, on 22 September 2006, when a Transrapid hit a maintenance vehicle left on the guideway at about 170 km/h, killing 23 people. The track closed in 2011. In South Korea, a 1 km demonstration line at Daejeon's Expo Park ran from 2008 until 2020 and was demolished in 2021.
Maglev Versus Wheel-on-Rail High-Speed Trains
The obvious rival is conventional high-speed rail, and the two are easy to confuse in photographs. A Chinese Fuxing CR400 looks futuristic, but it rolls on steel wheels on steel rails under an overhead wire. A maglev has no wheels at cruising speed, no pantograph and no rails in the ordinary sense, only a concrete or steel beam, often T- or U-shaped, that the vehicle wraps around or sits inside. If you can see rails and catenary masts, it is not a maglev.
The numbers show why maglev has struggled. France's TGV V150 reached 574.8 km/h on 3 April 2007 with wheels, only 28 km/h short of the L0. In daily service a Fuxing runs Beijing to Shanghai, about 1,300 km, at 350 km/h, faster than the Shanghai maglev's current cap. Conventional trains can also run on ordinary track into city-centre stations; a maglev needs its own guideway all the way in.
Where maglev wins is above about 400 km/h. Wheel-on-rail trains run into rapidly rising wear, noise and power use at those speeds, which is why no wheeled train carries passengers faster than 350 km/h. A maglev has no contact wear, and the Transrapid design can climb gradients of up to 10%, against roughly 3 to 4% for conventional high-speed lines, which allows straighter, more tunnelled routes like the Chuo Shinkansen's. The price is the guideway: building it from scratch, with no ability to share track, is what keeps the world's maglev network to a few dozen kilometres per country. For the full ranking of wheel and magnet trains, see our list of the fastest trains in the world, or set the two against each other with the high-speed rail comparison.