As Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announces the cancellation of HS2 Phase 2 (Birmingham to Manchester via Crewe), a look back to the early 1980's…
"Most railway lines in Britain are far from straight, the main line between London and Glasgow has dozens of curves, which slow the train down and make the journey that much longer than it would have been on a straight track.
Well of course, one answer to that problem would be to eliminate all these curves, to build an entirely new straight track, just as they did in Japan for the famous Bullet Train, but, even if that were possible here in Britain, it would involve new cuttings, enormously long tunnels and it would be prohibitively expensive.
So the engineers began to look for an entirely new solution, back in 1970 they built a rather strange looking vehicle at the Railway Technical Centre in Derby, one of the odd things about it was that the actual body, the bit above the wheels, could be tilted sideways. The theory was that by making it do this when the vehicle was travelling faster around the curve, it would prevent things from being thrown about inside.
Well, that was the theory and it's been tried and tested in the new Advanced Passenger Train, the APT…"
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