On February 7, 1973, in a damp field in rural Cambridgeshire, a train floated precariously through the sky. Research Test Vehicle 31 reached 104mph as it glided somewhat noisily above the flat, featureless landscape of the Ouse Washes near the village of Earith. It was, for a tantalising moment, a sci-fi vision of a not-too-distant future when Britain’s countryside would be criss-crossed with tracked hovercraft. But it was a future that never arrived.
The hovertrain, it was hoped, would speed passengers from London to Glasgow in little more than two hours at speeds of up to 300mph. It would revolutionise long-distance travel and consign conventional trains to the history books. But the vision never materialised. In 1975, little more than five years after construction started, the test track was demolished and the project was unceremoniously mothballed. Some engineers working on the hovertrain shifted their focus to seemingly more promising maglev technology, while others moved to the United States to try and keep the hovertrain dream alive. A version of the technology was pitched to the Canadian city of Toronto only to be met with muted interest. Back in Britain, the government, which had stumped up more than £5 million in funding for the hovertrain project, decided to focus on the almost equally ill-fated Advanced Passenger Train (APT) project. The hovertrain, along with all its promise and hubris, was quickly forgotten.
For those dreaming of hyperloops, the tale of the hovertrain is a stark reminder: the train (almost) always wins. But, as with Elon Musk’s much-hyped hyperloop, the hovertrain was, in theory, ingenious. 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.
Four decades later, hyperloop evangelists are making similarly bold and technically dubious claims about the apparent future of transportation. A phalanx of companies are currently competing to create a viable means of sending maglev-propelled pods down partly evacuated tubes at 760mph, taking passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a stomach-turningly brief 35 minutes. For the time being, despite all the hype, the hyperloop remains little more than a series of bold claims and an unremarkable looking stretch of test track in the Nevada desert. For Nevada desert, 2018, read Ouse Washes, 1973.
Ultimately, the hovertrain – which introduced the added complexity of needing to float to move – was out-gunned by more aerodynamic, conventional trains. To succeed, the hyperloop will not only need to float, it will also need to do so through air-tight tubes. That, it goes without saying, will be very hard, very expensive, and crucially, require a whole heap of energy.
When it was conceived the hovertrain offered something that no conventional train could: breakneck speed. At 300mph, it would outpace existing technology by a factor of three. But, over the years it was developed, the hovertrain slowed down and conventional trains sped up. The UK’s APT project, and France’s vastly more successful TGV inter-city, high-speed rail service (which was itself in competition for a short while with the fanciful, air cushion-suspended Aérotrain prototype), were able to use conventional rails and travel at speeds comparable to the more complex, less efficient hovertrain. At around the same time, the Japanese were developing the Shinkansen bullet train, which by the 1990s was reaching speeds of 275mph.
But the hovertrain, with its sleek, sci-fi design and unusual technology, held a special allure at a time when governments and engineers across the world were trying to work out how to reinvent train travel for the modern era. “Like to travel by train at 300mph? We may do in a few years time! Forget about wheels, the hovercraft principle, with a train supported by an air cushion and skimming over a magnetic field at near aircraft speed, is a dream no longer,” chirped the narrator on a British Pathé news film from 1966 about the hovertrain’s development.
"It must have been a really exciting time,” says Marcus Brittain from Cambridge University’s archaeology department, who has extensively researched the history of the hovertrain. “Talking to people of a certain age they remember the hovertrain very fondly as something that was unusual and exciting.” It was also utterly incongruous. As construction began, the sleepy Cambridgeshire village of Earith was overwhelmed by dozens of trucks delivering vast hunks of concrete that would make up the nearby test track. Some parts were so large that a local pub had to be partially demolished to allow deliveries to make it through the narrow country roads.
Construction of the one-mile test track started in June 1969 and was completed one year later. At its first public demonstration, the hovertrain reached a blistering 12mph. Two years later, it was whizzing along at more than 100mph. But the technical problems were mounting up. One of the key issues faced by engineers at the time was the weight of the system required to make the hovertrain hover. The hover pads that were essential to its design had to draw in air and then accelerate it from ambient speed to vehicle speed before pumping it back out. Doing this didn’t just require a lot of power, it also required a lot of kit and, crucially, weight. The solution was to move the power supplies for the hover system onto the tracks. It was, in economic terms, a fatal blow for the experimental hovertrain.
“The magnetic induction motor that drove it was less efficient than a rotary motor. Induction motors of that sort are large and bulky bits of kit with a lot of expensive equipment actually on the track,” says Roger Kemp, an engineering professor at Lancaster University who formerly helped develop the APT at British Rail Research and worked on the Pendolino and Eurostar projects. Suspension was also an issue: even though it floated about six inches into the air, the tracked hovertrain ran on a fixed, concrete monorail. “It required quite large motors and fans to be permanently running just to keep the thing in the air,” Kemp explains. And that also made the ride surprisingly bumpy. “There was an argument that if you have air then you're always going to have a nice, soft ride, but actually I think the suspension was not that great.” So rather than hover, the hovertrain ended up jolting through the skies. “At least with conventional railways you can go around with a tampering machine or something and stick a bit more ballast in,” says Kemp. “Once you build some heavy duty concrete structure, it's not something where you can just go and adjust it if it settles a bit.”
Despite impressive progress, the political will to support the project was waning. And so, one week after the hovertrain hit 104mph for the first time, government funding for the project was cancelled. “I think one of the big questions to ask yourself is why are we doing it?” Kemp says. “At one time it was a bit like mountain climbing: we're climbing this mountain because it's there. That was definitely the feeling in the 1960s and 70s: we'll do it because it's there, it's a technological challenge.” Ultimately, it was pragmatism that helped accelerate the hovertrain’s demise. The cost and environmental impact of building and laying the specialist tracks was seen as too high compared to more conventional, albeit slower, trains.
But all was not lost. The LIM system at the core of the hovertrain soon made another appearance at Birmingham airport. The AirLink shuttle, which ran from 1984 to 1995, was the world’s first maglev train system. And unlike the hovertrain that was born out of a naked desire to innovate, the Birmingham maglev was the result of tedious necessity. “The initial justification was that they didn’t want a conventional railway because conventional railways have heavy steel wheels and they need repairing by conventional railway mechanics,” says Kemp, who worked on the project. So rather than rely on British Rail to maintain a rail-based system, Kemp and his colleagues developed a train that floated on magnets and was propelled along by a LIM.
And while Birmingham airport no longer has a maglev train, the LIM technology central to its success is still in use today. Chances are you’ve taken a ride on a LIM train without even realising – the AirTrain JFK, which connects JFK International Airport to Queens in New York City, carries 27,000 people a day using LIM technology to propel the train at speeds of up to 60mph. And in Asia, maglev technology is finally starting to go places. In Shanghai, China, a maglev system – the fastest electric train in the world at 268mph, completes the 19-mile journey from airport to city centre in just eight minutes. And then there’s Japan. In April 2015, the Central Japan Railway Company sent a manned, seven-car train down its SCMaglev test track at 370mph using a related but different superconducting maglev system. The technology will eventually be used on the Chūō Shinkansen which is currently under construction between Tokyo and Osaka at a cost of ¥9 trillion (£62.2 billion). When complete, it will connect Tokyo and Nagoya in 40 minutes, and eventually Tokyo and Osaka in 67 minutes – running at a maximum speed of 314mph, with 90 per cent of the 177-mile line, arrow-straight to Nagoya built either underground or through tunnels.
While the floating train dream remains very much alive in Asia, in the UK it remains stuck in a field in Cambridgeshire. All that survives of the hovertrain’s hype and ambition are three 2.5-metre tall monolithic concrete stanchions. "You stand in one part of the landscape and you can see for miles,” Brittain says. “These are seriously solid pieces of architecture. This made an enormous, monumental imprint on the landscape.” Aside from the stanchions, now a favourite haunt for a group of ponies who graze the land, the hovertrain project is remembered by a small, awkwardly positioned interpretation panel installed by the local council. Beside a nearby road, a gate still displays the words ‘Hovertrain Limited’. And, about an hours drive away on the outskirts of Peterborough, Research Test Vehicle 31 is still on display. Catch the East Coast Main Line out of London and you can just about see it, perched atop a beam of concrete in the ramshackle grounds of Railworld Wildlife Haven. For a project that promised so much, it is an undistinguished end.
It remains to be seen if a similar fate awaits the hyperloop, but the companies involved will need to overcome similar economic and engineering challenges if they’re to outdo the remarkably resilient, economically viable, high-speed and environmentally friendly train – even if that train is propelled by magnets through tunnels at 314mph. As with the hovertrain, the hyperloop risks over-engineering a solution for a problem that’s already been partially solved. “It's one of those things where it would be fantastic to do it,” says Kemp. “But we should be doing it as ecologically as possible. If you're not careful it becomes a bit like Top Gear. Fantastic fun while it lasts, but not exactly a long-term, environmentally desirable solution for transport.”
Meanwhile, on the Ouse Washes, what was once a bold vision for the future of transport now makes an ideal scratching post for a pony. “It's a very silent landscape, other than the local agriculture,” Brittain says of the scrap of fenland that was used for the hovertrain tests. “Very dark, black soil matched by the greenery that caps the river. It's a very unusual place, eerie in a sense but also quite beautiful.” It’s also marked by the scars of almost 6,000 years of human activity. When it existed, the hovertrain track ran along the Old Bedford River, an artificial waterway constructed during the Great Level of the Fens during the 1630s – a monumental engineering project that has left an indelible mark on the landscape. “I imagine these stanchions will have a similar sort of imprint. Whether the above ground element of that survives beyond a few hundred years is open to question, but certainly what lies under the ground will be there of a very long time,” says Brittain. It’s something for future archaeologists to explore and encounter and scratch their heads over.”
This article is part of our WIRED on Transport series where we explore the challenges and solutions in transport, such as the future of borders after Brexit, the new race to make supersonic travel work and the Chinese taxi firm trying to beat Uber at its own game.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
