The world’s first ‘hovertrain’ could reach speeds of 270 mph in the 1960s

Around the mid-20th century, trains were in trouble. After the first rail lines were laid in 1804 England, the locomotive’s steamy forward chug seemed unstoppable. For over a century, trains were the unmatched champion for anyone looking to get somewhere further than a short horse ride away.

But by the late 1950s, that all started to change. The automobile’s rapid technological ascent meant more commuters were opting to get behind the wheel than on commuter trains. Air travel, propped up by significant government backing in the U.S. and Europe, shed rail’s ridership further by making long-distance travel faster. On top of all that, vast stretches of rail infrastructure across France, Belgium, and the Netherlands lay in rubble, casualties of World War II German bombing runs.

With rail’s future in limbo, ambitious engineers came to the rescue…or at least tried to. The post-war period produced some radical design gambles, but none were quite as conceptually ambitious as France’s short-lived Aérotrain.

It looked like a striking, comic-book-evoking silver tube, featuring a curved nose, reminiscent of a jetliner cockpit. The shiny steel body looked like a glistening cross between a train car and an Airstream camper, with bold red lettering streaked along its side.

Maybe most eye-catching of all though was its tail, which featured another giant rotating propeller or a jet engine, depending on the model. The Aérotrain hovered above the ground without wheels and propelled itself forward using an aircraft engine capable of churning out up to 12,000 pounds of thrust, roughly equivalent to the roar of a small jet engine at takeoff. That powerful engine meant the Aérotrain could reach speeds approaching 270 miles per hour, fast enough to leave conventional rail in the dust. In December 1969, Popular Science called the train-plane hybrid “the first guided vehicle to ride on air instead of wheels.”

But almost as quickly as the Aérotrain arrived, it disappeared, the last remnants of the much-hyped French “hovertrain” stored in a warehouse in the outskirts of Paris. So what happened?

abandoned, half-finished hovertrain rail in a rural field in France. — An unfinished section of the Aérotrain rail sits in a rural French field. *Image: Shutterstock* PHILIPPE MONTIGNY

The first hovertrain: fast, floating, and loud

The Aérotrain was the brainchild of French inventor Jean Bertin, who founded the firm Bertin & Cie after studying aeronautics. His concept (initially called the Terraplane) adapted hovercraft technology recently developed in Britain and applied it to a fixed-track train. The vehicle rode atop a cushion of pressurized air pumped downward between it and a concrete track shaped like an inverted T, lifting it so it never made physical contact with the surface.

That absence of friction from the ground meant it could reach top speeds faster than a typical rail car. It also meant less wear and tear from contact with the Earth which, in theory at least, meant less need to constantly repair degrading parts.

Bertin essentially borrowed this “ground effect” principle, where compressed air between a low-flying wing and the ground surface builds up pressure leading to upward lift, from the aviation industry. And that wasn’t its only similarity to planes. Instead of using a traditional motor to push itself forward, it used aircraft propellers powered by powerful turboshaft engines mounted on top of the cabin.

One of the later Aérotrain prototypes, which set a record for train speed at the time, used the same engine found on early Boeing 727 commercial airliners. That meant it was shockingly fast, but also head-rattlingly loud. The result was something like a ground level airplane that moved along a track.

“They’re basically little airplanes,” John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Emeritus and train policy expert James Cohen tells Popular Science. “They’ve got propellers and they’re the same sardine can piece of metal that a whole bunch of people are stuck into and with a propeller on the back pushing them forward.”

Cohen says that resemblance to an airplane wasn’t accidental. Bertin had a background as an aeronautical engineer. On a broader level, academics and scientists at the time were fascinated with recent advances in airplane and jet propulsion showcased during WWII and wanted to apply it anywhere they could.

“There was this sense that airplane technology could be applied on the ground or overwater and underwater and you could get kind of frictionless or semi-frictionless transportation at high speeds, very high speeds and it was not seen as pie in the sky,” Cohen says. “It was seen as a viable form of technology that could transform ground transportation.”

Several prototypes were developed, but the most successful of the bunch carried 80 passengers in two rows of two seats. The design intrigued members of the French government who viewed it as a quick way to connect the city center to airports. Though Bertin had proposed versions meant for suburban travel, the train’s noisiness and need for purpose-built concrete guide paths made it a hard sell for more urban areas.

But after years of trial and error, Bertin did eventually receive a contract to build out a line connecting Paris’s La Défense business district with the town of Cergy-Pontoise. Despite multiple prototypes, the Aérotrain would never transport passengers along the route, or any route for that matter.

The Aérotrain was bred from a culture of science and tech optimism

The Aérotrain, and a handful of international copycats that would follow it, were a product of their environment. Kennesaw State College Professor and train historian Albert J. Churella tells Popular Science the fact that hovertrain concepts gained traction was in large part a byproduct of postwar optimism. There was a sense that recent advances in science and technology could reliably reshape the world around us, and quickly. Journalists and newscasters drawn to the sleek, sci-fi looking designs were also more than willing to amplify that optimism further.

Magazine digital illustration of a hovertrain. Basically the hull of a plane with four wind turbines attached at its sides running along a platform. — The July 2000 issue of Popular Science describes how researchers at Tohoku University Institute of Fluid Science in Sendai, Japan, were designing a modern Aerotrain that could go 310 mph. *Image: Popular Science, July 2000 issue*

“Interest in hovertrains must be seen in the context of the technological enthusiasm of the post-World War II period—a time when many Americans believed that science and technology could work miracles,” Churella said. That same optimism also applied to European countries across the Atlantic.

“After all, they had grown up alongside impressive new developments, including Nylon, Rayon, penicillin, jet aircraft, and nuclear power that promised to generate electricity that was ‘too cheap to meter.’”

Cohen echoes that point.

“Both in France and in the US at this time, there’s tremendous optimism about the power of technology to transform lives,” he says.

But the Aérotrain’s single contracted route never actually came to pass. Ballooning costs and development delays dampened public support. A global recession and oil crisis in the 1970s left the French government, whose funding was essential, with increasingly little appetite for large, time-consuming infrastructure gambles.

Shifting attitudes away from flashy, high tech bets and towards more practical utilitarian solutions also reportedly played a role, as did a perception of these projects that they catered particularly to the wealthy. With daily expenses climbing, the average French citizen simply stopped seeing the value in cool but unproven technology they may never personally experience, a feeling captured by city planner Pierre Merlin, quoted by researcher Vincent Guigueno in the journal Technology and Culture:

“It will not be the average Jean-Claude Z who takes the Aérotrain, but his CEO who will travel either to Orly Airport or his factory in the new town of Trappes from the company’s head office located in the Tour Main-Montparnasse,” Merlin wrote.

The Aérotrain’s lasting legacy

The audacious hovertrain concept didn’t die in France. The United States Department of Transportation, under President Lyndon Johnson, formed the Office of High-Speed Ground Transportation and funneled $90 million into so-called Tracked Air Cushion Vehicles—air-propelled trains directly inspired by Bertin’s design. This eventually led to the production of several American hovertrain prototypes: the Rohr Industries Aerotrain and Grumman’s Tracked Levitated Research Vehicle.

John Volpe, President Nixon’s Secretary of Transportation, detailed some of those prototypes in a 1969 issue of Popular Science. Rohr’s Aerotrain showed promise, and even received a Department of Transportation contract to test an experimental version in Pueblo, Colorado, but like its French forefather, it died under the weight of mounting costs.

And while a $90 million investment (especially in the 1960s) might sound like a decent chunk of change, Churella says the funding was never sufficient to make a radically new rail technology viable. Worse, spreading the investment across multiple competing approaches doomed any single one from gaining real momentum. Plus, aside from eye-grabbing news reports, Churella says everyday commuters simply weren’t all that interested in the hovertrain’s success, one way or the other.

“Hovertrains were an idea without an application, and a concept without a viable market,” Churella says. “It was something that very few people wanted, and no one needed.”

A metal hovertrain that kind of looks like a long AirStream with a turbine on its back in a museum display. — A prototype of French inventor Jean Bertin’s Aérotrain was exhibited in 2013 in Paris. *Image: Siren-Com / CC BY-SA 3.0*

“The story of the hovertrains shows the dangers of technological exuberance,” Churella says. “It is all well and good to propose innovative new technologies, but they must serve a purpose.”

In the end, the upfront cost of building entirely new concrete or electromagnetic guideways made the economics of hovertrains nearly impossible to justify. Prior assumptions about the limitations of traditional rail also proved premature.

Incremental advances in conventional wheel-on-rail technology produced today’s high-speed trains—not quite as fast as the Aérotrain, but close enough, and crucially compatible with over a century of existing infrastructure. Today, France’s TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) high speed rail system is essentially a lightweight, highly refined version of the classic locomotive designs from the early 1800s.

Still, Cohen notes that viewing Bertin’s Aérotrain and the subsequent exploration of hovertrains as a total failure misses a broad point. Refinements of that underlying technology did eventually seed the development of maglev trains, which hover using powerful electromagnets rather than compressed air.

Today, a handful of maglev lines operate in China, Japan, and South Korea at incredible speeds. The most famous of them, Shanghai’s Transrapid, covers roughly 19 miles between Pudong International Airport and Longyang Road station in eight minutes, and is capable of 268 miles per hour—though its cruising speed is capped at around 186 mph.

And maglev tech, initially pitched as a commuter rail solution, has arguably had an even larger impact in other, unexpected applications, from airport luggage transportation and wind turbine parts to numerous military uses. If you peel back the onion far enough, all of those can be traced back to Bertin and his whack train-plane hybrid.

“That’s my lesson,” Cohen said. “to say [new technologies] are wacko is missing the point.” Despite where an individual invention ends up, new tech is “going to have all sorts of other applications”—applications we might not be able to see for decades to come.

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