Recently while looking through an issue of the Soviet magazine Sputnik from 1974, I came across a photo of an absolutely wild looking train prototype. It was from an article about the visit of a Communist Party regional secretary to the Kalinin Machine-Building Plant where he was shown it.
He said of the prototype "At the very end, I saw the "aerotrain", "250 km/h, range of 1,000 km"...A kind of airplane on rails, without wings, sleek, with two turbojets on the roof, which increased its resemblance to an airplane even more. This "aerotrain" was built according to the projects of the Research Institute of Railway Construction and the design bureau headed by the famous aircraft designer Alexander Yakovlev."
Apparently the hope was that the aerotrain would do the Moscow to Leningrad run in as little as three hours, which would have been quite amazing at the time.
Sadly, the designers could never get around the fact that the train had to use an astonishing amount of fuel. Far too much for it to be practical. So the whole project was scraped.
There is still an old prototype out there though. A retro bit of futuristic design.
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