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600 Miles Per Hour: WVU Hoping To Team Up With Virgin Hyperloop One As A Hyperloop Certification Center

MORGANTOWN (KDKA) -- West Virginia University's "Personal Rapid Transit" (PRT) cars zoom on monorails up to thirty miles an hour.

But WVU hopes soon to construct a hyperloop testing facility where small wheel-less pods in a vacuum tube can move people and products up to six hundred miles an hour.

"We're looking for a home for a hyperloop certification center, and we're working with the state of West Virginia to understand how we can partner together to make that a reality," said Diana Zhou, director of project strategy for Virgin Hyperloop One, at an event at WVU on Thursday, attended by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice.

The Los Angeles-based company says WVU's Morgantown campus is one of twenty sites under consideration to help test hyperloop.

Zhou told KDKA money editor Jon Delano that WVU is a top tier site.

"West Virginia University and the collaboration of academic partners, the professors who have been here today, has been extremely exciting for us and very, very impressive," said Zhou.

University officials see a perfect match.

"This is a new and different way of moving people," noted Sarah Biller, executive director of WVU's Vantage Ventures. "There are no frameworks today, and WVU brings the depth from hundreds of years of engineering and overcoming complex engineering challenges."

Now Virgin Hyperloop says it won't decide where it's next testing and certification site will be until sometime in mid-2020.

After that, it's going to take a couple years before things are up and running.

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