The Train of Tommorow

June 2, 2018 7:32 AM

The strange tale of the hovertrain, the British hyperloop of the 1970s
posted by Artw (12 comments total)

Ah...it's not for you- it's more of a Huddersfield idea.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:09 AM on June 2, 2018 [9 favorites]

The British government has been canceling cool projects ever since VE-day.

I suspect that the Oxbridge classics majors in the Treasury would die of embarrassment, if a British engineering project were to turn out to be the best in the world.
posted by monotreme at 10:16 AM on June 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Don't miss the cool photos on Wikipedia of the French Aérotrain linked to from the OP article.

I also found the Schienenzeppelin, a German locomotive that ran on regular tracks during the 1930s but was moved by an airplane propeller. Only one was ever built but according to Wikipedia in 1931 it set a railway speed record of 230.2 km/h which still stands as the fastest for a "petrol powered rail vehicle".

Who knows what other marvels of 20th-century technology are on display in Elon Musk's skull-shaped tropical island fortress.
posted by XMLicious at 10:18 AM on June 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

I mis-read that as hoovertrain, and the mental image are pretty absurd.
posted by theora55 at 10:22 AM on June 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I suspect that the Oxbridge classics majors in the Treasury would die of embarrassment, if a British engineering project were to turn out to be the best in the world.

ARM chips, but we sold that off.
posted by Artw at 10:37 AM on June 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

The prototype train is at Railworld in Peterborough. On display for all to see as you pass through Peterborough station.

A trip on the maglev at Birmingham International was fun day out for the family-woo.
posted by Helga-woo at 12:11 PM on June 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

How can any description of the British Maglev project be complete without mention of Eric Laithwaite, key developer and proponent of the form of linear induction motor that it used?

Laithwaite retired as Professor of Heavy Electrical Engineering at Imperial College just before I arrived there; my personal tutor once described him - with, I should say, a degree of nostalgia - as 'last of the genuine Mad Professors'. Unfortunately he's best known as a really spectacular case of Engineer's Disease, thanks to his inability to understand novel ideas about the physics of gyroscopes.

He came back to Imperial to give a lecture on the topic to the student physics society, which I went to, and I can confirm that he was an engaging and captivating lecturer. However, that did not make him right, as demonstrated when he started going through the mathematics of what he thought was going on with a precessing gyroscope, and wrote up the formula for the vector cross product on the board.

"You may notice" he said, "that this isn't quite the usual way the cross product is calculated. This is my version, which gives better results."

I swear to this day I actually felt two hundred mental gearboxes crashing.
posted by Major Clanger at 2:48 PM on June 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

I have been a bit confused about this for a while. It keeps being referred to as a maglev, but the descriptions of operation make it sound like while the propulsion is magnetic, the actual lift is by forced air, like a hovercraft, which is decidedly not magnetic levitation.
posted by ckape at 8:44 PM on June 2, 2018

The tracked hovercraft, as with its more famous seafaring cousin, was lifted on a cushion of air so that, as the name suggests, it hovered a few inches above a monorail-style elevated concrete track. Unlike a hovercraft, the hovertrain was propelled along not by a giant fan but by a state-of-the-art linear induction motor (LIM), a form of contactless propulsion that uses magnetic fields to produce thrust. The only slight hitch? It was, in engineering, economic and environmental terms, a total nightmare.
posted by Artw at 9:05 PM on June 2, 2018

I mis-read that as hoovertrain

We could do with one of those, tbh, to deal with the leaves.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:25 AM on June 3, 2018

Reminds me of Brunel's atmospheric railway.
posted by poe at 2:22 PM on June 3, 2018

Deutsche Welle's DocFilm “The mobility of tomorrow” (in English, direct .mp4 link) is about the modern Hyperloop projects but covers a couple of historical pneumatic and magnetic rail systems too.
posted by XMLicious at 10:45 AM on June 22, 2018