Since it’s been an astonishing seven decades since the invention of the process that was finally put to a test on the next-to-the-last day of last year, when Premier Zhu Rongji took an inaugural ride with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, which helped fund and build this line.Now, common cadres were having a turn.

Local media called them “joyrides,” these series of trial runs to the international airport in Pudong, across the river from Shanghai proper, that add a bit of flash to the Spring Festival.They certainly live up to the billing.

Smiles abound inside the sleek train as, with a breathtaking whoosh, it rockets to 300 kilometers per hour in two minutes flat.Overhead, like a giant scoreboard, an LED blinks out our record-breaking progress till we top 430 kph.

The Maglev is faster than any speeding locomotive precisely because it’s as much like a plane as any railroad we’ve known.

True, the train has no wings, but no wheels or engine, either.Transrapid, the German firm that developed the system, describes the Maglev as “the first fundamental innovation in the field of railway technology since the invention of the railway.”