Waterloop, designed by a team from the University of Waterloo in Canada, is one of the entries in Elon Musk’s Hyperloop contest

Ilyas Vali was sitting on yet another soul-sapping commuter train from Preston to London in 2013 when he read two articles that changed his life.

The first was a news report on HS2, the government’s £42.6 billion plan to shave up to 45 minutes off his journey time by 2033. The second was an infamous white paper from Elon Musk, the technology billionaire, setting out his proposals for “Hyperloop” pods that would travel on a bed of magnetic force at an average speed of 600mph.

London to Preston in 19 minutes. Newcastle to Bristol in 29. Edinburgh to London in 40. If Musk was right, HS2 would be obsolete before the UK had started laying down the track.

Ilyas Vali, assistant project manager of rLoop, another entry in the competition NOT KNOWN

“I thought, ‘We’re going to spend tens