The U.S.’s only maglev builder, General Atomics, occupies a campus in Southern California, the perfect place to start building out its proposed alternative to planes for long distance travel – high speed rail. Calls for a line connecting Los Angeles to Las Vegas or to San Francisco began a number of years ago, but nothing has developed in California or any other state. The various pro-rail lobbies can only point to the lines in Germany, Japan, France, and the record-setter in China.

On this day, November 12, in 2003, in a test run of its new maglev train, the Transrapid achieved a speed of 311 miles per hour. That would make the trip between Los Angeles and Las Vegas take just about an hour.

The Transrapid may be the fastest train in China, but that same year a Japanese maglev train and the French TGV reached speeds of around 360 mph. As the name implies, the trains work by magnetic levitation: no wheels, no friction to overcome. Engineers calculated that lifting the train off the rails does not take much energy – it’s the propelling it forward against air friction that takes up the most.