Tilting trains - television programme 27/6/08 19:30

On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:07:59 +0100, David Hansen wrote:

>The Advanced Passenger Trains were
> intended to rival France's TGV and Japan's bullet train, but negative
> press and complaints about motion sickness helped scupper the project
> before it could get going.

Was the APT scrapped because people felt sick (feeble excuse), or the
fact that the tilting mechanism kept on breaking, sticking it in certain
unwanted positions (or at least, that's what I recall of the project at
the time), and more importantly, the project eating through taxpayers
money.

On 28 Jun 2008 21:11:03 GMT, Ar <Ar@127.0.0.1> wrote:

>Was the APT scrapped because people felt sick (feeble excuse),

No, the only people who felt sick were the journalists who overdid BRs
hospitality in Glasgow the night before the inagural journey.

On 28 Jun, 22:11, Ar <A...@127.0.0.1> wrote:
>
> Was the APT scrapped because people felt sick (feeble excuse), or the
> fact that the tilting mechanism kept on breaking, sticking it in certain
> unwanted positions (or at least, that's what I recall of the project at
> the time), and more importantly, the project eating through taxpayers
> money.


Its failure was quite simply down to lack of investment. As is with a
lot of UK enterprise; we get something within an ace of being the dogs
b*ll*cks and then loose our bottle then promptly hand the technology
to jonny foreigner.

Tony Polson wrote:

>The exasperation of experienced railway design engineers was clear.
>Vast amounts of scarce research and development funds were squandered
>on the APT while other projects went begging.

For those who haven't read my comments previously, it is worth
knowing that an order was actually placed with Brush, for 15
production trains, APT-S (Squadron) . The propulsion equipment
would have been Asea, packaged by Brush.

The order had cancellation clauses, and somebody at BR took the
risk of proceeding with clearance only for the design work,
hoping that it would save time if it all went ahead. Work
started, but unfortunately the necessary high level clearance to
continue never came, and the cancellation clause was invoked.

I'm sure many would have viewed this as simply throwing money
away, and few were aware of what actually happened. The only
artifact which remained was my large "APT-S" rubber stamp,
intended for endorsing drawings, and to my regret I neglected to
find a home for it.

Chris
--
Chris J Dixon Nottingham UK
chris@cdixon.me.uk

Have dancing shoes, will ceilidh.