Yes. Apparently when jet turbines came along they were discounted as ever being useful for commercial/passenger airplanes because they were so incredibly inefficient. I mean, really incredibly inefficient.
What they didn't take into account is that the turbines allow you to fly at much, much higher altitudes. The reduced drag there more than makes up for the lower efficiency. And gets you a smoother ride and higher speeds as well.
Modern turbofan engines are much more efficient, but that's basically because they really are turbo-props with enclosed propellers, though we call them "high bypass turbofans".
And of course if jets have to drop to a lower altitude, for example because their cabin has become depressurised, range is drastically reduced.
Keeping a vacuum over a length of hundreds of km is pretty hard, and in fact, has never been done.
High vacuum like the LHC would be hard, but that’s vast overkill. Even the equivalent of just 100,000 feet would be enough for super sonic trains.
Commercial aircraft fly at ~30,000 feet which is ~30% atm vs ~1% atm at 100,000 feet. That’s edge of space territory, but sill a long way from LHC style vacuums.
https://www.avs.org/AVS/files/c7/c7edaedb-95b2-438f-adfb-36d...
PS: In terms of force it makes little difference as you go to ever lower fractions, but it’s much harder to maintain and pump down the pressure as you keep going lower.
Really, nobody is going to build a system where this is a significant issue past the design stage. So, IMO it’s a consideration but a non issue.
The LHC however deals with high vacuume becase they need particles to travel hundreds of miles without encountering any atmospheric particles. That would let trains reach orbital velocity without issue, but would be horrifically expensive.
Basicly 100% to 1% vacuume is considered rough/coarse and it cheap. 1% to 1 micron is the middle ground which is increasingly difficult but still not that bad. Under 1 micron aka High vacuume is expensive and mostly the realm of science experiments.
https://www.hydraulicspneumatics.com/200/TechZone/Vacuum/Art...
If want to go 1000km in 3-4 hrs then you are the kind of problem hyperloop might solve.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing–Shanghai_high-speed_...
But the thing is that electrified rail networks doesn't address the quadratically increasing losses from drag at high speeds. There's a reason you don't see railroads operating at airline speeds: drag at sea level is a killer. In fact, at high enough speeds, the energy of air travel is actually LOWER than that of a sea level train.\
Altitude gives you a lot of efficiency. The idea of the vacuum train is to bring that efficiency down to sea level. And I think it's a good idea, but a real engineering challenge. In principle, you can keep a vacuum pretty easily. Vacuum tubes remain sealed and evacuated for decades without energy consumption, for instance.
It's just at the interfaces you have to worry about leakage, and there it's a matter of careful sealing. It's possible to get really good at it. The International Space Station is full of interfaces (and thermal cycling every 90 minutes) and would quickly run out of air if we didn't know how to maintain a vacuum well at interfaces.