First class documentary. It's the same old sad old story, that the short-sighted fickleness of Government and the Rail Unions all had their doom-laden input while Private Eye and the tabloids benefitted greatly from the constant criticism and ridicule heaped upon the APT project. The engineers and designers could overcome all technical challenges, given enough time, but they had zero chance when up against the usual suspects. The railways, like aviation and shipbuilding in the UK, were all destroyed by people that knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing!
@@hollyruston2444 46 years of technical knowhow, resources, man hours, equipment, energy, and money, invested at the expense of many, many other worthy ideas, and it still didn't work properly. How many more decades would you like to see wasted on it?
The APT was a good train with technical applications beyond its years and was not given the money to perfect the tilting mechanism,instead we sell it of to italy and buy the pendelino trains another good UK train .
In 1976 Fiat Ferroviaria built the ETR 401 trainset, a tilting train using an active system with 10 degrees of tilting that used gyroscopes to detect the corner in its early phases in order to have a more punctual and comfortable inclination: this is why the FIAT project has been successful since the '70s. In 1982 FIAT bought some APT patents that were used to improve their technology for the ETR 450 trainsets. Wikipedia - Advanced Passenger Train - Legacy
I loved heading to Glasgow on the Pendolino - I would wait for it especially at Lancaster - even though I actually wanted to go to Edinburgh and not Glasgow. The tilt at Beattock with the telegraph poles sideways was memorable
@@fredroberts8275 Yes but we spent a fortune on developing it, then a bunch of Tory idiots pulled the plug just as it was getting close to being a commercial success and now we spend even more buying what we basically developed from the Italians instead of doing it ourselves and making a killing in the process
@@RW-nr6bh "Britain" has made some disastrous decisions from the aircraft like the TSR-2, to Concorde, missiles from Blue Streak to Skybolt, cross channel travel such as the SR-N hovercraft, nuclear energy (see Windscale/Sellafield) and the handful of very expensive life expired stations still generating. Britain has a chequered history of failure and success despite who was running the shop.
I was a graduate trainee with BR in the early eighties, and had 4 trips from Euston to Glasgow on the APT. It was a great train, and each journey was trouble free. Apart from the political interference from the anti-rail Thatcher crowd, there was significant opposition from some of the senior members of BR management. At one meeting in 222 (BR hq at the time) a very senior manager came in to address us, and his opening words were ‘that’s the end of the APT project’. When I asked why, his response was that loco hauled trains were far better, as the locomotives could be used for other things, whereas the APT units were dedicated. This, he declared, was a major disadvantage. Isn’t it ironic that 40 years on, most of the passenger services on the West Coast main line are now fixed sets? We British seem to have a wonderful knack of being in the lead on projects, only to let that lead slip through our fingers, whether that is the APT, TSR2, rocketry, and countless other developments that, had they been pursued to a finish, could have made us world leaders in those fields, to say nothing of the income that could have been made from exports. Short sightedness seems to be endemic in both British industry and politics.
The problem Is geographical IF the UK had the same size land mass as the US, Russia or China It would be a totally different we'd have the natural resources to fund all the things you stated & more.
What you describe is still true to this day. Our Internet connectivity is only just starting to catch up with the rest of the world, even though BT had the tech and wanted to get it in the ground in the 80s.
Honestly i don't know how anyone could consider this train laughing stock. Yes it did have problems, yes it was on a budget, put into service with too little testing and had a problem with its breaks on its first public journey, but why? Because it used new technology - fairly complicated technology too, it was built for very high speeds on tracks from, at times, the victorian era. The work that went into this train alone forbids me calling it laughing stock. It is a technological achievement that was ahead of its time and had problems because it wasn't given enough time.
I think it’s the classic British response to anything new and bold it’s a kind of ignorance really, seen it a lot I’m afraid. I do agree with your comments though.
Hate to say this, but the vast majority of the public are not technical and have an attention span of around 5 minutes. They just want "it to work" without understanding the research and development that goes into developing new technology.
Japan, France, and Germany have decided to do high-speed rail without tilting trains. Building new high-speed lines is expensive, but it solves one problem even a perfect tilting mechanism doesn't: having to share lines with slower regional, local, and goods trains.
Fritz - the whole point and reason why we in the UK opted for a tilting high speed train was (and STILL is) the fact that the West Coast mainline (out of Euston) is famously twisty. It's not long and straight like the East Coast line (out of Kings X - and the line used for speed records). Because the West Coast line is full of curves , a new high speed train was designed specifically to run on this line, and this line only. That's why the APT had tilting technology. The diesel 125's weren't suited for the West Coast line as they couldn't go round the corners very fast. They ran on the East Coast line until a few years ago, when the electric Azuma trains replaced them. As for the West Coast, old style Electric locomotives continued to ply the line up to the late 90's, when Italian made Pendolino trains replaced them. Incidentally the Pendolinos used the technology from the old APT trains, but refined it making it more comfortable for passengers.
Actually both Germany and Japan have had high speed tilting trains already with Germany having the ICE-T and Japan with the N700 shinkansen which allows for faster running on the existing high speed tracks.
@@robtyman4281 You forgot to mention that the Intercity 225 (Class 91) took over from the IC125 on the ECML and provided a good service fro many years until the Azuma took over recently. Fiat had their own tilt technology although they did buy some of the BR tilt tech to refine their design.
Used to pass by the Shields Road depot every day in Glasgow and would see the APT and hope I'd get to travel on it one day. Another example of potential innovation poorly managed - just like the TSR-2
funny you should mention the TSR2 my career and life has brought me into contact with some of the people that worked on both projects and they where spoken about in very much the same light, the TSR2 would have been about 20 years afterwards and the ATP about 15... both groups felt very strongly it was an opportunity missed and if you have worked around Railway or Air Force people they are normally pretty negative!!!
@@mjc8281 TSR2 was intensely political. I believe the U.K. government was trying to get a loan from the IMF because we were basically broke. The US said they would veto our application unless we cancelled both TSR2 and P1154 (what going to be the full-size Harrier).
"We got there first, and now we're the worst." Britain in a nutshell, as long as the talk is about virtually anything that involves industry and engineering.
I don't know how you do it but I watch these even when the subject has little interest. These documentaries are so well written, edited and presented so that helps immensely. Normally trains just don't interest me but the way you present the info I'm hooked!
As a very lucky 5 year old boy, I was given the privilege of pressing the button and driving this out of the production shed for it's official unveiling at a Crewe works open day. I think Prince Charles was there. My Dad fitted electrics at Crewe for half of his working life.
I was learning mechanics at Watford College 1982-1983 and one day we saw one of these broken down on the tracks out of the window,the college on Water Lane has long since gone and replaced by Tesco's,back then that loco looked so modern to us youngster's, thanks for a great upload,best wishes to the uploader,family,friends and fellow fans.
I was a 10 year old then and, like most kids of my time, had the Hornby 00 model railway and accompanying catalogue - the pinnacle of futuristic attainment for us would have been a Hornby Zero1 digital controller with the Hornby model of the APT set. Both the Zero1 and the APT now look incredibly dated but, having just cracked 50 years old, I guess they (and I!) are...
@@AndrewCleland1972 Congratulations on your 50th,time flies and yes those locomotives were amazing in real life or model form,being older now I'd luv to build a Hornby track,best wishes.
Congratulations on your 50th,time flies and yes those locomotives were amazing in real life or model form,being older now I'd luv to build a Hornby track,best wishes.
Very interesting and well done. Just a small detail (more of a curiosity): “Pendolino” is not exactly Italian for pendulum (as said on min. 25:22), that being “pendolo”. The “-ino” suffix in Italian (transforming “pendolo” in “pendolino”) is often used to mean a smaller or nicer version of the word it refers to. Thus, “pendolino” translates as a “small pendulum”, or better, “cute pendulum”. It was an early-era marketing twist, to create a name that sounded nicer and more unique than a mere, literal “pendulum”.
I saw a documentary on the APT at around the time it was running trials. They kept saying that it was built to aerospace standards, but then there was an issue with the brakes which was diagnosed as having been caused by a pin that had been made 1/2" too long
To be fair, that is the kind of failure which has happened in aerospace before. Ever heard of the Mars Climate Orbiter? It never managed to orbit Mars, it went too deep into the atmosphere for aerobraking when it first arrived at Mars and then burnt up. Why was that? Because Lockheed Martin used US customary units instead of SI units as NASA used/the spec called for and NASA didn't double-check everything, meaning they never noticed until it had burnt up.
Thank you for a fascinating and comprehensive review. I hadn’t realised that the roots of the project went back to the 1930s. So close but not quite! We can thank Mrs T for scrapping APT and subsequently importing Italian technology. What a patriot she was.
There were comments in the video about excessive hunting leading to derailments. I recall reading and or hearing of that problem occurring in the UK after welded rail had been implemented. Apparently engineers were unaware that a dangerous build up of those oscillations in the past were dampened by the wheels passing over the joints of jointed rail. The advent of welded rail brought that to light. It does demonstrate how such seemingly fundamental aspects can be underestimated. Then again, that happens all the time in realm of economics and finance on a national and global scale. The difference being the mistakes of the former are unintentional while the disasters of the latter are quite intentional.
heres an interesting fact for you. in 1984 it was reported... the final surviving apt-p would be used for testing for a new set of trains in 1991, this set was to have tilting carrages but not powercars and was to have a reduced speed of 140mph. the project was called apt-u (u for updated) sometime between 1984 and 1988 intercity decided to make some changes to that plan. tilting train carrages were to be ditched as an idea to save time and money and avoid the same issues as the apt-p, the max speed of the train was kept at 140mph and the project was to be renamed. the rename is the biggest clue as to the fact that apt-u infact became the class 91 is the fact it was marketed as intercity 225 (225 being the speed in kmh instead of mph like in the class 43 hst name of 125) when its converted to mph you get 140mph. the class 91 production was finished by 1991 ogo the apt project never actually died atall, it just got forced into a more conventional train design through fear of yet more issues and ditched the relationship with the advanced passenger train project to give it a fighting chance with customers and the press class 91 intercity 225 is infact apt-u dialed back to be a standard train
@@pizzaplanettruck9761 It's pretty cool but the design is a little too sci-fi for my taste. The final production version feels more grounded in reality.
The APT-P is my favourite looking after the HST, both designs have aged well. The APT-E looks awesome too although I always think it has a baboon face from a certain angle.
British Rail did brilliantly with the resources it had, deemed the ‘second most cost effective railway in Europe’. Thanks for a highly informative vid. The interior design of APT-P is lovely: open,airy and modernist.
Maybe it might have been worth mentioning the two Hornby models of the locomotive? Such poor government decisions have destroyed the engineering and design of British locomotives and we now have to buy in trains from foreign companies including Hitachi. Britain was a pioneer in railways but we have lost all of that now.
@@KarlHamilton People still keep voting for Labour that killed the UK aerospace industry and the UK space program. And don’t forget it was Labours Barbara Castle that signed most of the closures from the Beeching report.
It was the right train at the right time it was the wrong government and Our f;cking wonderful short-sighted government does it again same with the TRS2 plane it is just f;cking unbelievable
@@squeaksvids5886 only after conservative beaching had already axed two thirds of the whole Railway system. Labour got the crumbs off the Conservative table.
An altogether fascinating, informative, and well-presented video, as usual! The amount of effort you put into research, narration, and sourcing and editing archival footage is second to none. And as a bonus, at 17:22, one gets to hear the idiom "at full tilt" (inward tilt) used in its literal and not metaphorical sense. :)
Saw the video's thumbnail in my recommendations with "1 minute ago" and I HAD to see this. Really, really like this because is more extensive than other videos and put some perspective in its development. Now this channel needs a video about the Shinkansen to complete the "HST saga" with the TGV - ICE - AVE and now the APT 😄
I REALLY enjoyed that video Ruairidh. Thank you so much for composing it and uploading it to YT. Such a great pity that it was abandoned so close to what would have been a glorious finish line.
Well done for turning this sad story into a highly fascinating video. How typical of us so nearly to perfect the realisation of the concept, only to be beaten to it by....FIAT! At least we have the 390s to show for our efforts, although I'm sure they are still restricted to 125 mph.
I knew someone who was in the senior management of the British Rail Research Centre at Derby. The said that the Research Centre had been created against the wishes of BR management and there was a very strong NIH (Not Invented Here) sentiment amongst BR management against the APT. I remember seeing a TV interview with a senior BR manager where he said that he had given the project one more week to show it could work. That happened to be a week where there was extensive icing on the overhead cables. The cancellation was then announced.
I love the 1970’s and 1980’s BR livery. The blue and yellow in the 70’s and the Intercity 125 in the 80’s. Give me those days instead of now anytime!! I remember seeing a documentary showing the trains at CF Booth in Rotherham. Behind the Millmoor football ground.
Great video and so sad like so many British inventions the plug was pulled just as all the problems were almost fixed. I remember a Modern Railways article several years ago reviewing the issues and saying that an additional complication was the mix of aerospace engineers and railway engineers on the project. In aviation you follow the manual - end of discussion - whereas on the trains you are allowed much more discretion. Either methodology is valid but when you mix the two, nobody knows what is going on.
The British weren't the only country trying to iron out the bugs on their tilting trains. The JNR 381 Series train sets from the early 1970's were also tilting units, but getting the tilt to work properly proved to be a problem; JNR even had to offer motion sickness bags for passengers because the tilting motion of the 381 caused passengers to experience motion sickness.
From this telling of the story it seems like someone (or someones) in the design team played a key role in sinking the project by leaking details of the problems to the press. I wonder if they felt/feel ashamed of that - and why they did it.
Probably not, they most likely either saw the APT as a waste of tax money and thus wanted to get it scrapped as the right thing to do, or they had a financial interest and their stock portfolio did well from the cancellation. That and given the general attitude towards BR at this point in time.
From 4:44 the Talgo II is shown, which as far as I know did not tilt. Talgo developed a passive tilting system during the 1970s using a modified Talgo III set and implemented it in the Talgo Pendular, delivered from the 1980s, which has been the basis of all further developments of Talgo.
I was trainspotting on the end of Euston Station platform in the summer of 1980 when suddenly the APT-E turned up and rolled into the station. A special moment for me. Apparently, some of the other people there were expecting it, and had told me, but I didn't believe them. Luckily, I stayed a bit longer, and got some smashing photos on my Kodak instamatic!
I can only imagine how awesome it was to see such futuristic looking trains like the HST and APT in those days, especially when you consider that steam trains weren't that long gone!
I have seen at least 3 TH-cam docs about this train. Including of course Mustard and WTYP. I’ve listened to the podcast of Railnater and still you brought me new information about this wonderful piece of English cockup engineering. How do you do it
If you had actually listened carefully to this excellent documentary, you would have realised that the ATP was NOT a "piece of English cockup engineering." It was pioneering work and, given enough time, the technical challenges would have been overcome, bringing to the UK and the world a completely new and unique concept in rail travel. If the word "cockup" should be applied, it should done so in referring to the short-sighted, fickle politicians, the bloody-minded unions and the self-serving naysayers of Private Eye and the tabloids.
@@bigdmac33 aaah did I step on your pathetic English pride. Grow up man. The APT had potential but they also failed miserably. It took more then 10 years to built a train that simply didn’t work. It’s simple to blame the government or the unions but in the end the engineers built a train that didn’t do what it was supposed to. In the end it was the Italians that figured out how to make it work. Deal with it
@@bigdmac33 At the same time, there was a high sunken cost and an unknown amount of work and funding required to make it reliable in service, for limited benefits over other existing solutions. I definitely understand why the APT was cancelled.
Just like the TSR-2, trashed when Defence Minister Duncan Sandys stated in the 1957 Defence White Paper that the era of manned combat was at an end and ballistic missiles were the weapons of the future, and we are still waiting some 65 yaers later.
Just a little fix: 5:45, the train wasn’t developed by renfe, but by Talgo (the manufacturer) FOR renfe (the national operator), both Spanish. Talgo’s passive tilting “pendular” system evolved, to the point where they’re still in use today with very high speed trains (even the new ones, the Talgo Avril, or Renfe S106). Specially pioneering with the single bogey mechanism allowing less maintenance and more space.
Great video this is the best apt one out there. The other videos seem to mock the train, you explained that most of the problems were fixed or almost fixed at the end sadly.
Fantastic video as always. I saw this APT at Crewe Heritage Centre just last week. She's looking a bit sun faded on the front now but the sides and interior are looking pretty good for their age. The APT was withdrawn a year before I was born, and being a big guy at 6 ft 3, I struggle for space in standard class on the Pendolono but on the APT, I had more than enough room and found the seats very comfortable. I'm saddened by the history of the APT as it deserved to be so much more and clearly would have gone on to great things if it wasn't for poor management and a very negative press.
Such an iconic piece of history! Thank God Richard Branson (Kind of) revived the 'tilting' idea with his Virgin Pendolino and Voyager sets; although we've yet to reach the dizzying heights of speed of the APT.
But he didn't revive tilting? An Italian company produced a rather successful model of tilting train, improved it by studying what went wrong with the APT, then eventually a later model was sold to Britain. As for speed, that's more an issue with the infrastructure in most places. Note that HS1 is, in fact, much faster than the APT.
I love the look of the APT-E! For something that was designed and built in the 60s it looks so futuristic and modern even today, and it makes the actual APT look quite goofy in comparison.
I had to stop watching this, the best potted history of the wonderful APT, more than a few times. From increasing anger at the infighting; at the short-termism of the parliamentarians; from increasing sadness at the waste of all that effort by the engineers and from the very public joy some have in belittling the Other Blokes' Efforts. I suppose that at least you can say that this latter trope has grown out of our very healthy ability to mercilessly mock ourselves. As if the decades of ups and downs weren't enough, the powers that be obviously decided that the 5h1ττγ stick we were beating ourselves with wasn't big enough. They therefore made sure that some years later, we had to revisit the whole affair and basically buy back our own technology from its current improving Italians. O Dio!
UK engineer: I have developed a great new invention/system. UK bureaucrats: But how can we make it a failure? UK public: But how can we make fun of it? UK government: But how can we sell it off?
I went on the APT when the railway staff had a chance to try it. I travelled from Glasgow to london but unfortunately it developed a problem with the tilting mechanism, leading to the train having to slow down. I thought it was brilliant, and hoped that the teething problems would soon be fixed, but alas, it was scrapped. I worked on the West Coast Mainline, we had to have an extra lookout due to the high speed of the APT.
My workmate went on it and like you said it was fantastic. Sadly I missed out but if anything like the smooth ride of the 373 Eurostars it really would of been the best train we ever had for speed and comfort. A least we saved one and I got to look in that.
It's strange standing at the heritage centre in Crewe and in front of the APT and seeing an Avanti West Coast Pendolino go past...It's sad...The grandad being sat in a nursing home imobile, while the grandkids play about outside the railings
It is a sad story. I hope lessons have been learned. It seems to me that the industrial management and governments in the UK often suffer from short-termism and lack of commitment. In contrast, the Japanese in particular often show great perseverance, even when initially presented with obstacles.
I rather think it's an example of sunken cost fallacy. By the time it was cancelled it was offering limited benefits over the existing alternative solutions, which were more reliable and cost less to maintain.
@@andrewreynolds4949 like what the hst? Nope electrification of the ecml came after. Railtrack then failed to complete the wcml upgrade and trains still can't do 140 on the wcml.
@@damiendye6623 Yes, like the HST and later the IC 225. Speeds over 125 now require in-cab signaling anyway; apparently there's not a tremendous savings on most of the WCML (especially in the south where it's busiest). The real solution for faster speeds is something like HS2, and even that doesn't save a whole lot of time (it mostly just makes capacity as a huge grade separation for the fast trains).
@@andrewreynolds4949 the ic225 or formally known as class91 and mk4 are based off the apt. They even had provision to retrofit tilt. Hence the shape. While the HST was a success it was just 2 locos either end hence why it was able to perform better. And the apt did have capt which was kinda early in cab signalling as it gave apt specific details that other trains didn't get
@@damiendye6623 The fundamental idea was that a design with tilting and an equivalent design without tilting did not have significantly different levels of performance. I am told the final production APT concepts, much more reliable but also more conservative in design, were similar to the IC 225, with a power car on one end and a DVT on the other. Essentially the 225 sets were designed from lessons of the APT project, but without tilt function. When the final APT design was prepared for production they looked at the cost-effectiveness before ordering it, and they found that the performance improvement was minimal in comparison to the additional maintenance and reliability cost added by the tilt function. They then cancelled the APT project in favor of more conventional design. Despite not being a true expert on the subject I rather agree with the decision.
As a motorcyclist I find this quite an interesting idea. I wonder if satnav. would have been useful for knowing about the next bend? That might have been a way to remove the delay in responding to a bend. Another idea might have been to have liquid that could move from one side of the train to the other.
Modern trains always know where they are just from their interaction with the infrastructure so it's simply a matter of consulting a map of the route. Of course for that you need reliable and reasonably inexpensive mobile computers which just didn't exist in the early 80s. These days it's a solved problem.
There was no such thing as SatNav/GPS at the time this train was developed, tested, and finally scrapped. The necessary small, fast computers didn’t exist either - computers were big, slow, and clunky, and couldn’t communicate with each other, let alone (non-existing) GPS satellites. A 50mb hard drive was the size of a washing machine!
As a motorcyclist I always found it ridiculous that the boss of the Can-Am motorcycle company which produced a motorbike with 2 wheels at the front instead of one said that the reason why the bike didn't have a tilting mechanism was because it wasn't natural to lean into corners. I mean, had this guy even ridden a motorbike before?
@@B-A-L Bloody hell! I’m not a biker, but thinking of getting a ‘reverse’ trike (got a balance problem). It won’t be a CanAm no I know this. Bloody hell, when I’m driving my car, I lean myself into corners in my seat!!!!! Anyone who’s ever ridden a push bike knows about leaning!
an active ballast system based on liquids is a novel idea for a train tilt..but the volume needed to alter the cg would have been difficult in practice to shift, and to where? tanks on the sides ? regards
Thanks for posting this. 👍 A perfect example of how political dogma and lack of foresight stifles British imagination and skill with the result that instead of APT becoming successful and exportable we end up importing the technology instead! It is amazing the APT did so well in the light of underfunding and government antagonism towards rail travel generally. At the time many countries in Europe (France, Spain, Germany etc.) were investing heavily in rail infrastructure and now have superb high speed networks that improve their economies. Meanwhile the UK still has the commercial and safety failures of privatisation to sort out and infrastructure improvements anywhere north of London are years in the future and continually being reduced in scope.😡
The uks railways are the safest in Europe, you have no idea what you’re talking about, British rail routinely made terrible decisions and was basically managed decline of the railways.
From what I can see the APT still adhered to some fundamental design flaws, and would have needed a lot more work to really sort out the problems. The Italians were already working on their own somewhat successful tilting train design, and eventually they looked at what went wrong with the APT to further improve their own design. As for infrastructure outside London, I would point to Scotland's rather all-encompassing long-term plan that was set in motion not long ago.
I worked for rail track for a couple of years as a data analyst. Total joke... they spent £40m on an asset register, written internally as Access 2 database. They'd been operating a "fix it when it's broke" policy on signal light bulbs. Yep... stuff you can buy for less than the price of a sandwich. Then... someone in the government made the connection between a terrible accident that killed a bunch of people. Some things are critical. They demanded an asset maintenance system that replaced such things before they break, and rail track developed a register that a) was inaccurate and b) had no functionality relating to maintenance. That's £40 million. They got a slap on the wrist and had to start again. The rail maintainers, take the job sheets for the day, sit down with management and tick off most of the work items for the day, without even inspecting them, they know they can get away with it. I've even known senior engineers resign after closing sections of track as unsafe... when their shifts ended a junior engineer would be told to reopen the line with a speed restriction. Another very senior engineer, a contractor, managed to get contracts with both Rail track and one of the maintainers. All told an illegal conflict of interest as he was responsible for signing off work performed by a maintainer on behalf of rail track. He was pulling in over £1500 a day. He was fired without prosecution. One morning when I got to work there'd been an accident where a train mounted a platform and killed loads of people. Our lead engineer was able to guess the problem correctly in seconds, incompetence and bad management. A simple job left unfinished. The enquiry took years, cost millions and achieved nothing.
@@nkt1 well, no investment short of a full scope HS2, which is currently struggling to meet the scope it was first designed with, let alone a full vision of a high speed corridor all the way to Glasgow and Edinbruh
@@seansands424 Other countries build dedicated high-speed lines, as straight as possible, using tunnels if necessary and with the track on any curves canted for fast trains. The WCML carries mixed traffic and was built long ago, taking the easiest and cheapest route.
Very well told story, but quite a sad story, and to think if we had just managed to fund the project properly Britain would have once again pioneered new technology
This story reminds me of the British Motorcycle Industry, especially the story of the Triumph Trident/ BSA Rocket 3, another example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Google: Triumph Trident - Ahead of the Curve, to see a case study of why the original British Motorcycle Industry collapsed
When I working on a overhead bridge in Warrington cheshire.Big contract. They were testing the tilt train every single day. Great job I was just 17.. lines were so dangerous being electrifide we held that train up many times due to the bridge build. Line being turned of for safety The contractor was AF budge... That tilt train used to get stuck true the tilt you could hear the rumble. It was obvious that tilt train was never going work. Money to was just astronomical then scrap yard job disgusting. Days like that I wish I had my camera.
Love the opening photo. taken at my home town of Lancaster where I was born in 1943. Most of my photos are of steam back in the 1950/60s; if only we had videos back then
Love your style of video mate. Well written and informative. As fellow a train/car/plane/military hardware enthusiast, I find your vids very enjoyable. Keep up the great content mate. p.s. would love to see a video about the class 47s and/or 37s
So when they decided to show the train off properly they did it on an unelectrified line and had to push it with a diesel locomotive? It's a historic location, sure, but wouldn't it have been smarter to let the new shiny train move under its own power? This actually reminds me of something. Every ICE in Germany is named after a city, and they are usually taken into service at the station of the city they're named after. So when Goslar was chosen as the name of a brand new ICE 3, it had to get there. One problem, Goslar doesn't have an electrified station. This high speed train, which Deutsche Bahn uses as a symbol of climate friendly travel, was pushed into the station by a diesel engine. Even the ceremony at the station acknowledged that this was slightly silly. Oh, and this was in 2017.
I feel like the Goslar bit was silly, but not really malicious. Pushing it there once by diesel isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. It brought some attention, but didn't cause more than some bemused headshaking. The APT was a lot worse when it comes to public perception.
The issue with running it on electric power is those sort of large rail events are usually held in places that are not electrified. It wasn't so much they chose a place to unveil it as they took it to a show to display. They still have similar Rail Live shows annually, on a large site which is mostly not electrified.
@@andrewreynolds4949 It's surprising that so much of EU and UK rails are not electrified at this point. I'm sure that progressives have been fighting for more electrification for years. It gets more urgent all the time (along with sustainable generation of course).
@@emjayay I'm not surprised at all, considering here in America there's very little electrification at all. In any case there's not much incentive to electrify a yard of tertiary importance, like the kind they can get available for rail shows and events
The line in question was shildon the birth place of uk rail and it was shown as part of anniversary proceeding with trains past and present at the time. It's now the site of the shildon museum which is part of the nrm
The APT was typical of Britain at the time - the requirement to get products on the market without adequate development. This killed the motorcycle industry and, later, our car industry.
As soon as I heard British Leyland, I thought oh dear…….. It was the right train at the wrong time. We weren’t ready for something like that in stodgy early 1980’s Britain. Although BR didn’t help themselves either. Instead of doing it properly and ironing out the flaws with prolonged testing, they rushed it into service and paid the price with that disastrous press junket from Glasgow to London.
British Leyland Gas Turnines had a lot of experience with gas turbine road vehicles including dacing cars. One of its constituent companies, Rover, built Whittle's jet engine during WW2 and after the war they looked at using a gas turbine to power a car.
Once the 1973 fuel crisis occurred the gas turbine APT was a non-starter and all further work was done on the 27kV electric version, thus APT-P. But APT-E had very little trouble with its ten turbines once they were run-in and sorted, and they produced enough power to reach 152.3 mph, a record which STILL stands for non-electric trains in the UK, and to get from London to Leicester on less than an hour!
The APT, TSR2, Harrier (leaving aside the GR1/3/FRS1) - all examples of things we made/built but didn't properly develop/exploit thus had to buy from elsewhere, namely - as you said - Pendolino trains, the McD F4 Phantom K/M (in RAF/FAA parlance Phantom FG1 (FAA) and FGR2 (RAF) & post-GR3-era AV8B Harrier's (in RAF parlance, the GR5/GR7). At least we did get however the Class-43 HST "InterCity" - like every third child I've still got my Hornby model in a box in my parents attic in the classic BR livery of c. 1986. Hasn't been used in at least 25 years.
By the time it was withdrawal the Class 370 was a pretty damn reliable trainset and very often was used to fill gaps left by broken down HSTs. BREL wasted time and money building the HST instead of focusing 100% on the APT programme. A diesel-electric conversion of the APT-E would have been a vastly better stopgap solution than the HST, while the aircraft like construction would have made the power cars vastly more crash worthy compared to the flimsy fibreglass bathtub that is the Class 43.
How could a diesel-electric version of the APT have been vastly superior to the HST, when the HST was already an excellent train? The APT was a very specialised and expensive design, whereas the HST was an evolution of existing technology; it was pretty rugged, could go anywhere and do almost anything. Equipping depots all over the country to handle the articulated bogies, hydro-kinetic brakes, tilt packs etc of 100+ APTs would have been a logistical and financial nightmare.
It's noticeable the APT-P tilts much more than the Pendolinos. I remember travelling on one from Preston to Carlisle, it was quite a queasy experience, I was only a young teenager so no alcohol consumed, and indeed our train was terminated at Carlisle due to one carriage not tilting in sync with the rest of the consist
Based on my knowledge the pendolino's tilt has been reduced during the years. While the first generation tilted up to 13/10 degrees now they tilt only up to 8
It was mentioned in the video that the APT's tilt was reduced & this resolved sickness issues. It was determined that the sickness was caused by the brain being confused by seeing tilting but not feeling it. Reducing tilting meant you could feel a little tilt when you saw it. The alcohol would have made it worse, but the first public run was started in darkness & nobody felt ill before they could see the horizon moving up & down.
It was very similar to Metroliner of USA but not for tilting train but high speed The Metroliner couldn't have reached their full performance because they rushed
I don’t believe the new IETs tilt. I definitely know that the ones ordered by Avanti West Coast will not tilt even though they are replacing tilting trains (Class 221 ‘Super Voyager’)
@@terrier_productions yeah the newer hitachi trains dont tilt, none of them do, they are still more cramped on the inside than the HSTs though due to having much higher floors
@@andrewreynolds4949 yes, I know that.. I had a feeling that if I hadn’t mentioned which class was being replaced then they might have thought that I meant the Pendolinos Any your right, only the 220s, 221s and 390s tilt if you’re not counting the last remaining APT-P and the APT-E
Thanks for this. I have a really strong memory of seeing this in a museum when I was a child, I thought it was Steamport in Southport but I guess it must have been a day trip to Crewe with my grandad. I think it was being used as a Cafe but that was a VERY long time ago so my memory could well be wrong.
First class documentary. It's the same old sad old story, that the short-sighted fickleness of Government and the Rail Unions all had their doom-laden input while Private Eye and the tabloids benefitted greatly from the constant criticism and ridicule heaped upon the APT project. The engineers and designers could overcome all technical challenges, given enough time, but they had zero chance when up against the usual suspects. The railways, like aviation and shipbuilding in the UK, were all destroyed by people that knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing!
The tilting train was conceived in the US in 1939, finally abandoned in the UK in 1985. Hmm, so short-sighted and fickle.
@@JK_Clark Spoken like a non-Engineer.
@@JK_Clark The tilting train concept is alive and well - see Pendolino
@@alan2804 you're saying the Pendolino is British?
@@hollyruston2444 46 years of technical knowhow, resources, man hours, equipment, energy, and money, invested at the expense of many, many other worthy ideas, and it still didn't work properly. How many more decades would you like to see wasted on it?
The APT was a good train with technical applications beyond its years and was not given the money to perfect the tilting mechanism,instead we sell it of to italy and buy the pendelino trains another good UK train .
In 1976 Fiat Ferroviaria built the ETR 401 trainset, a tilting train using an active system with 10 degrees of tilting that used gyroscopes to detect the corner in its early phases in order to have a more punctual and comfortable inclination: this is why the FIAT project has been successful since the '70s.
In 1982 FIAT bought some APT patents that were used to improve their technology for the ETR 450 trainsets. Wikipedia - Advanced Passenger Train - Legacy
Just like the LRC :/
Our f;cking wonderful short-sighted government does it again
@@Martindyna not to mention that the first experimental pendolino train, the Fiat Y 0160 was built around 1969/1970
‘The APT was a good train’ - I thought it was a passenger train. (Sorry couldn’t resist).
Heartbreaking to blast through Crewe on a Pendolino, look over at the APT, and think what could have been.
Only in Britain could the technology of future be developed and put straight into a museum.
I loved heading to Glasgow on the Pendolino - I would wait for it especially at Lancaster - even though I actually wanted to go to Edinburgh and not Glasgow. The tilt at Beattock with the telegraph poles sideways was memorable
The UK now has tilting trains, so heh in the long run it won.
@@fredroberts8275 Yes but we spent a fortune on developing it, then a bunch of Tory idiots pulled the plug just as it was getting close to being a commercial success and now we spend even more buying what we basically developed from the Italians instead of doing it ourselves and making a killing in the process
@@RW-nr6bh "Britain" has made some disastrous decisions from the aircraft like the TSR-2, to Concorde, missiles from Blue Streak to Skybolt, cross channel travel such as the SR-N hovercraft, nuclear energy (see Windscale/Sellafield) and the handful of very expensive life expired stations still generating. Britain has a chequered history of failure and success despite who was running the shop.
I was a graduate trainee with BR in the early eighties, and had 4 trips from Euston to Glasgow on the APT. It was a great train, and each journey was trouble free. Apart from the political interference from the anti-rail Thatcher crowd, there was significant opposition from some of the senior members of BR management. At one meeting in 222 (BR hq at the time) a very senior manager came in to address us, and his opening words were ‘that’s the end of the APT project’. When I asked why, his response was that loco hauled trains were far better, as the locomotives could be used for other things, whereas the APT units were dedicated. This, he declared, was a major disadvantage. Isn’t it ironic that 40 years on, most of the passenger services on the West Coast main line are now fixed sets? We British seem to have a wonderful knack of being in the lead on projects, only to let that lead slip through our fingers, whether that is the APT, TSR2, rocketry, and countless other developments that, had they been pursued to a finish, could have made us world leaders in those fields, to say nothing of the income that could have been made from exports. Short sightedness seems to be endemic in both British industry and politics.
The problem Is geographical IF the UK had the same size land mass as the US, Russia or China It would be a totally different we'd have the natural resources to fund all the things you stated & more.
I guess that's our fault for allowing commie unions to fester and take a stranglehold.
Is it true that the APT glitches were on the verge of being solved when the plug was pulled on the project?
I agree. The UK has great engineers and scientists let down by terrible management and self-serving politicians.
What you describe is still true to this day. Our Internet connectivity is only just starting to catch up with the rest of the world, even though BT had the tech and wanted to get it in the ground in the 80s.
Honestly i don't know how anyone could consider this train laughing stock.
Yes it did have problems, yes it was on a budget, put into service with too little testing and had a problem with its breaks on its first public journey, but why?
Because it used new technology - fairly complicated technology too, it was built for very high speeds on tracks from, at times, the victorian era.
The work that went into this train alone forbids me calling it laughing stock. It is a technological achievement that was ahead of its time and had problems because it wasn't given enough time.
I think it’s the classic British response to anything new and bold it’s a kind of ignorance really, seen it a lot I’m afraid. I do agree with your comments though.
Hate to say this, but the vast majority of the public are not technical and have an attention span of around 5 minutes. They just want "it to work" without understanding the research and development that goes into developing new technology.
Context is inflation and recession.
It is because the british press and general public quite love shitting on themselves and each other.
@@paulnolan1352 It's called "resistance to change"
Japan, France, and Germany have decided to do high-speed rail without tilting trains. Building new high-speed lines is expensive, but it solves one problem even a perfect tilting mechanism doesn't: having to share lines with slower regional, local, and goods trains.
Mixing high and low speed trains on busy tracks must be a complicated nightmare.
Fritz - the whole point and reason why we in the UK opted for a tilting high speed train was (and STILL is) the fact that the West Coast mainline (out of Euston) is famously twisty. It's not long and straight like the East Coast line (out of Kings X - and the line used for speed records).
Because the West Coast line is full of curves , a new high speed train was designed specifically to run on this line, and this line only.
That's why the APT had tilting technology. The diesel 125's weren't suited for the West Coast line as they couldn't go round the corners very fast. They ran on the East Coast line until a few years ago, when the electric Azuma trains replaced them.
As for the West Coast, old style Electric locomotives continued to ply the line up to the late 90's, when Italian made Pendolino trains replaced them.
Incidentally the Pendolinos used the technology from the old APT trains, but refined it making it more comfortable for passengers.
Actually both Germany and Japan have had high speed tilting trains already with Germany having the ICE-T and Japan with the N700 shinkansen which allows for faster running on the existing high speed tracks.
@@robtyman4281 You forgot to mention that the Intercity 225 (Class 91) took over from the IC125 on the ECML and provided a good service fro many years until the Azuma took over recently. Fiat had their own tilt technology although they did buy some of the BR tilt tech to refine their design.
Just go slower
Used to pass by the Shields Road depot every day in Glasgow and would see the APT and hope I'd get to travel on it one day. Another example of potential innovation poorly managed - just like the TSR-2
funny you should mention the TSR2 my career and life has brought me into contact with some of the people that worked on both projects and they where spoken about in very much the same light, the TSR2 would have been about 20 years afterwards and the ATP about 15... both groups felt very strongly it was an opportunity missed and if you have worked around Railway or Air Force people they are normally pretty negative!!!
@@mjc8281 Our f;cking wonderful short-sighted government does it again
Our f;cking wonderful short-sighted government does it again
Our f;cking wonderful short-sighted government does it again
@@mjc8281 TSR2 was intensely political. I believe the U.K. government was trying to get a loan from the IMF because we were basically broke. The US said they would veto our application unless we cancelled both TSR2 and P1154 (what going to be the full-size Harrier).
All I can say is that the APT-P Livery is amazing
Once again, a great project hits the wall of British politics. Short term headlines over long term progress.
"We got there first, and now we're the worst."
Britain in a nutshell, as long as the talk is about virtually anything that involves industry and engineering.
I don't know how you do it but I watch these even when the subject has little interest. These documentaries are so well written, edited and presented so that helps immensely. Normally trains just don't interest me but the way you present the info I'm hooked!
As a very lucky 5 year old boy, I was given the privilege of pressing the button and driving this out of the production shed for it's official unveiling at a Crewe works open day. I think Prince Charles was there. My Dad fitted electrics at Crewe for half of his working life.
I was learning mechanics at Watford College 1982-1983 and one day we saw one of these broken down on the tracks out of the window,the college on Water Lane has long since gone and replaced by Tesco's,back then that loco looked so modern to us youngster's, thanks for a great upload,best wishes to the uploader,family,friends and fellow fans.
I was a 10 year old then and, like most kids of my time, had the Hornby 00 model railway and accompanying catalogue - the pinnacle of futuristic attainment for us would have been a Hornby Zero1 digital controller with the Hornby model of the APT set. Both the Zero1 and the APT now look incredibly dated but, having just cracked 50 years old, I guess they (and I!) are...
@@AndrewCleland1972 Congratulations on your 50th,time flies and yes those locomotives were amazing in real life or model form,being older now I'd luv to build a Hornby track,best wishes.
Congratulations on your 50th,time flies and yes those locomotives were amazing in real life or model form,being older now I'd luv to build a Hornby track,best wishes.
Very interesting and well done. Just a small detail (more of a curiosity): “Pendolino” is not exactly Italian for pendulum (as said on min. 25:22), that being “pendolo”. The “-ino” suffix in Italian (transforming “pendolo” in “pendolino”) is often used to mean a smaller or nicer version of the word it refers to. Thus, “pendolino” translates as a “small pendulum”, or better, “cute pendulum”. It was an early-era marketing twist, to create a name that sounded nicer and more unique than a mere, literal “pendulum”.
I saw a documentary on the APT at around the time it was running trials. They kept saying that it was built to aerospace standards, but then there was an issue with the brakes which was diagnosed as having been caused by a pin that had been made 1/2" too long
Sounds like it was a bit crap.
To be fair, that is the kind of failure which has happened in aerospace before.
Ever heard of the Mars Climate Orbiter? It never managed to orbit Mars, it went too deep into the atmosphere for aerobraking when it first arrived at Mars and then burnt up. Why was that? Because Lockheed Martin used US customary units instead of SI units as NASA used/the spec called for and NASA didn't double-check everything, meaning they never noticed until it had burnt up.
@@TheDemocrab Engineers behavior! Didn't think they made any mistakes!
Thank you for a fascinating and comprehensive review. I hadn’t realised that the roots of the project went back to the 1930s. So close but not quite! We can thank Mrs T for scrapping APT and subsequently importing Italian technology. What a patriot she was.
BR management wanted shot of it for years before Thatcher came to power. She just pulled the trigger.
BR engineer; "It's been over 40 years and we still can't get this right."
Roland Harmer: "Let's chuck more money at it."
@@JK_Clark since be has only worked on it since 1969 to 1984 that does make 40 years now does it
@@damiendye6623 It does??
Our Parliamentarians have never been 'patriots' but more the quislings/stooges of big-business and of international high-finance.
There were comments in the video about excessive hunting leading to derailments. I recall reading and or hearing of that problem occurring in the UK after welded rail had been implemented. Apparently engineers were unaware that a dangerous build up of those oscillations in the past were dampened by the wheels passing over the joints of jointed rail. The advent of welded rail brought that to light. It does demonstrate how such seemingly fundamental aspects can be underestimated. Then again, that happens all the time in realm of economics and finance on a national and global scale. The difference being the mistakes of the former are unintentional while the disasters of the latter are quite intentional.
heres an interesting fact for you.
in 1984 it was reported...
the final surviving apt-p would be used for testing for a new set of trains in 1991, this set was to have tilting carrages but not powercars and was to have a reduced speed of 140mph.
the project was called apt-u (u for updated)
sometime between 1984 and 1988 intercity decided to make some changes to that plan.
tilting train carrages were to be ditched as an idea to save time and money and avoid the same issues as the apt-p, the max speed of the train was kept at 140mph and the project was to be renamed.
the rename is the biggest clue as to the fact that apt-u infact became the class 91 is the fact it was marketed as intercity 225 (225 being the speed in kmh instead of mph like in the class 43 hst name of 125) when its converted to mph you get 140mph. the class 91 production was finished by 1991
ogo the apt project never actually died atall, it just got forced into a more conventional train design through fear of yet more issues and ditched the relationship with the advanced passenger train project to give it a fighting chance with customers and the press
class 91 intercity 225 is infact apt-u dialed back to be a standard train
The APT-P is one of my favorite train designs of all time. It's a shame the program was beset with so much cluster-fudgery.
BR through and through.
What do you think of the APT-E gas turbine version?
@@pizzaplanettruck9761 It's pretty cool but the design is a little too sci-fi for my taste. The final production version feels more grounded in reality.
@@peterdibble
Yeah it kinda does.
The APT-P is my favourite looking after the HST, both designs have aged well.
The APT-E looks awesome too although I always think it has a baboon face from a certain angle.
British Rail did brilliantly with the resources it had, deemed the ‘second most cost effective railway in Europe’. Thanks for a highly informative vid. The interior design of APT-P is lovely: open,airy and modernist.
2nd most cost effective?? Not during the 1950s and 1960s!
@@andrewreynolds4949 I’ll try to trace the source. Maybe it was referring to the Seventies.
Excellent documentary. Your clips in this series, are always a joy to watch.
Maybe it might have been worth mentioning the two Hornby models of the locomotive? Such poor government decisions have destroyed the engineering and design of British locomotives and we now have to buy in trains from foreign companies including Hitachi. Britain was a pioneer in railways but we have lost all of that now.
And yet people still vote for the tories.
@@KarlHamilton People still keep voting for Labour that killed the UK aerospace industry and the UK space program. And don’t forget it was Labours Barbara Castle that signed most of the closures from the Beeching report.
It was the right train at the right time it was the wrong government and Our f;cking wonderful short-sighted government does it again same with the TRS2 plane it is just f;cking unbelievable
@@KarlHamilton Both in as bad as each other both useless just think of themselves
@@squeaksvids5886 only after conservative beaching had already axed two thirds of the whole Railway system. Labour got the crumbs off the Conservative table.
An altogether fascinating, informative, and well-presented video, as usual! The amount of effort you put into research, narration, and sourcing and editing archival footage is second to none. And as a bonus, at 17:22, one gets to hear the idiom "at full tilt" (inward tilt) used in its literal and not metaphorical sense. :)
Saw the video's thumbnail in my recommendations with "1 minute ago" and I HAD to see this. Really, really like this because is more extensive than other videos and put some perspective in its development.
Now this channel needs a video about the Shinkansen to complete the "HST saga" with the TGV - ICE - AVE and now the APT 😄
Aw yes, I’ve been waiting for this one! Saw the prototype APT-E in person the other week, super futuristic looking thing.
It’s futuristic in a weird Thunderbirds/Back To The Future kind of way - next to an 800/801/802 it looks dated
I REALLY enjoyed that video Ruairidh. Thank you so much for composing it and uploading it to YT. Such a great pity that it was abandoned so close to what would have been a glorious finish line.
Well done for turning this sad story into a highly fascinating video. How typical of us so nearly to perfect the realisation of the concept, only to be beaten to it by....FIAT! At least we have the 390s to show for our efforts, although I'm sure they are still restricted to 125 mph.
It would have been a good train if only they kept at it
Wait wasn't the 390 built by alstom after buying Fiat ferroviaria?
@@marcogentile3392 yes
Yes, Pendolinos only do 125mph. They share the lines with slower trains which they would catch up too quickly if they went any faster.
Brilliant documentary. Love the videos you produce - you’re one of the best out there!
I knew someone who was in the senior management of the British Rail Research Centre at Derby. The said that the Research Centre had been created against the wishes of BR management and there was a very strong NIH (Not Invented Here) sentiment amongst BR management against the APT.
I remember seeing a TV interview with a senior BR manager where he said that he had given the project one more week to show it could work. That happened to be a week where there was extensive icing on the overhead cables. The cancellation was then announced.
I love the 1970’s and 1980’s BR livery. The blue and yellow in the 70’s and the Intercity 125 in the 80’s. Give me those days instead of now anytime!! I remember seeing a documentary showing the trains at CF Booth in Rotherham. Behind the Millmoor football ground.
Great video and so sad like so many British inventions the plug was pulled just as all the problems were almost fixed. I remember a Modern Railways article several years ago reviewing the issues and saying that an additional complication was the mix of aerospace engineers and railway engineers on the project. In aviation you follow the manual - end of discussion - whereas on the trains you are allowed much more discretion. Either methodology is valid but when you mix the two, nobody knows what is going on.
The British weren't the only country trying to iron out the bugs on their tilting trains. The JNR 381 Series train sets from the early 1970's were also tilting units, but getting the tilt to work properly proved to be a problem; JNR even had to offer motion sickness bags for passengers because the tilting motion of the 381 caused passengers to experience motion sickness.
From this telling of the story it seems like someone (or someones) in the design team played a key role in sinking the project by leaking details of the problems to the press. I wonder if they felt/feel ashamed of that - and why they did it.
Probably not, they most likely either saw the APT as a waste of tax money and thus wanted to get it scrapped as the right thing to do, or they had a financial interest and their stock portfolio did well from the cancellation.
That and given the general attitude towards BR at this point in time.
Fantastic video as usual
Very well researched and explained
This will now become my go to video to explain the APT story
Cheers
From 4:44 the Talgo II is shown, which as far as I know did not tilt. Talgo developed a passive tilting system during the 1970s using a modified Talgo III set and implemented it in the Talgo Pendular, delivered from the 1980s, which has been the basis of all further developments of Talgo.
Thank you Ruairidh, a fascinating series of videos. I was at Rainhill 150 as a 17 year old with my father. A memorable day indeed.
I was trainspotting on the end of Euston Station platform in the summer of 1980 when suddenly the APT-E turned up and rolled into the station. A special moment for me. Apparently, some of the other people there were expecting it, and had told me, but I didn't believe them. Luckily, I stayed a bit longer, and got some smashing photos on my Kodak instamatic!
I can only imagine how awesome it was to see such futuristic looking trains like the HST and APT in those days, especially when you consider that steam trains weren't that long gone!
That would have been the APT-P. The APT-E was retired in 1976 & never ran into Euston.
All of these "Motion History" documentaries are really interesting and informative, about many of my favorite subjects. Great work!
I'm so glad we've finally got this!!!!
I have seen at least 3 TH-cam docs about this train. Including of course Mustard and WTYP. I’ve listened to the podcast of Railnater and still you brought me new information about this wonderful piece of English cockup engineering. How do you do it
The engineering was sound.
It was sabotaged politically
Mustard made it simple, WTYP made it funny, and Ruairidh made it informative.
If you had actually listened carefully to this excellent documentary, you would have realised that the ATP was NOT a "piece of English cockup engineering." It was pioneering work and, given enough time, the technical challenges would have been overcome, bringing to the UK and the world a completely new and unique concept in rail travel. If the word "cockup" should be applied, it should done so in referring to the short-sighted, fickle politicians, the bloody-minded unions and the self-serving naysayers of Private Eye and the tabloids.
@@bigdmac33 aaah did I step on your pathetic English pride. Grow up man. The APT had potential but they also failed miserably. It took more then 10 years to built a train that simply didn’t work. It’s simple to blame the government or the unions but in the end the engineers built a train that didn’t do what it was supposed to. In the end it was the Italians that figured out how to make it work. Deal with it
@@bigdmac33 At the same time, there was a high sunken cost and an unknown amount of work and funding required to make it reliable in service, for limited benefits over other existing solutions. I definitely understand why the APT was cancelled.
I really think the APT was right train, wrong time. It was way ahead of its era.
Thinking the same thing!
It was the right train at the right time it was the wrong government
I have to wonder how good it might have been unleashed on the ECML had that line been electrified by the early, rather than late, eighties.
@@emjackson2289 it was unleashed on the ECML, the 225 became the production version of the APT
Just like the TSR-2, trashed when Defence Minister Duncan Sandys stated in the 1957 Defence White Paper that the era of manned combat was at an end and ballistic missiles were the weapons of the future, and we are still waiting some 65 yaers later.
Another gem Rory. These are broadcast quality videos. I know just how much work you put into them.
Just a little fix: 5:45, the train wasn’t developed by renfe, but by Talgo (the manufacturer) FOR renfe (the national operator), both Spanish. Talgo’s passive tilting “pendular” system evolved, to the point where they’re still in use today with very high speed trains (even the new ones, the Talgo Avril, or Renfe S106). Specially pioneering with the single bogey mechanism allowing less maintenance and more space.
Great video this is the best apt one out there. The other videos seem to mock the train, you explained that most of the problems were fixed or almost fixed at the end sadly.
STILL looks stunningly futuristic even now!
It really does look decades ahead in terms of design. Aesthetically pleasing to look at. A great looking train.
I would describe @17.34 this being an official description of "Kinetic Envelope". Overall Rory this is yet another fantastic and informative clip.
Type 17:34 with a colon and the Tube changes it to a hyperlink.
Again, another superb documentary! Much appreciated, thank you!
Ruairidh MacVeigh some fantastic background detail to the evolution of the APT concept.
We have a tilting train here in Sweden, referred to as the X-2000 (actually named X-2) which is pretty neat.
And still in active service till this day, it is actually receiving it's biggest overhaul of the trains entire careér
Fantastic video as always. I saw this APT at Crewe Heritage Centre just last week. She's looking a bit sun faded on the front now but the sides and interior are looking pretty good for their age.
The APT was withdrawn a year before I was born, and being a big guy at 6 ft 3, I struggle for space in standard class on the Pendolono but on the APT, I had more than enough room and found the seats very comfortable.
I'm saddened by the history of the APT as it deserved to be so much more and clearly would have gone on to great things if it wasn't for poor management and a very negative press.
Such an iconic piece of history!
Thank God Richard Branson (Kind of) revived the 'tilting' idea with his Virgin Pendolino and Voyager sets; although we've yet to reach the dizzying heights of speed of the APT.
But he didn't revive tilting? An Italian company produced a rather successful model of tilting train, improved it by studying what went wrong with the APT, then eventually a later model was sold to Britain.
As for speed, that's more an issue with the infrastructure in most places. Note that HS1 is, in fact, much faster than the APT.
@@andrewreynolds4949 it was revived else the pendolino would have come here. Before that the intercity 250 program was going to work on the wcml
I love the look of the APT-E! For something that was designed and built in the 60s it looks so futuristic and modern even today, and it makes the actual APT look quite goofy in comparison.
I had to stop watching this, the best potted history of the wonderful APT, more than a few times. From increasing anger at the infighting; at the short-termism of the parliamentarians; from increasing sadness at the waste of all that effort by the engineers and from the very public joy some have in belittling the Other Blokes' Efforts.
I suppose that at least you can say that this latter trope has grown out of our very healthy ability to mercilessly mock ourselves.
As if the decades of ups and downs weren't enough, the powers that be obviously decided that the 5h1ττγ stick we were beating ourselves with wasn't big enough. They therefore made sure that some years later, we had to revisit the whole affair and basically buy back our own technology from its current improving Italians. O Dio!
UK engineer: I have developed a great new invention/system.
UK bureaucrats: But how can we make it a failure?
UK public: But how can we make fun of it?
UK government: But how can we sell it off?
I went on the APT when the railway staff had a chance to try it.
I travelled from Glasgow to london but unfortunately it developed a problem with the tilting mechanism, leading to the train having to slow down.
I thought it was brilliant, and hoped that the teething problems would soon be fixed, but alas, it was scrapped.
I worked on the West Coast Mainline, we had to have an extra lookout due to the high speed of the APT.
My workmate went on it and like you said it was fantastic. Sadly I missed out but if anything like the smooth ride of the 373 Eurostars it really would of been the best train we ever had for speed and comfort. A least we saved one and I got to look in that.
Such a shame! I loved the APT concept when it first came out, wish we could have had a worldbeater! Fantastic documentary - thank you
It's strange standing at the heritage centre in Crewe and in front of the APT and seeing an Avanti West Coast Pendolino go past...It's sad...The grandad being sat in a nursing home imobile, while the grandkids play about outside the railings
A former BR colleague of mine said they were issued with a speed gun. They clocked an ATP doing 165mph though Coppull near Wigan.
Fiat had the platanito (active tilting train), and in Spain we got the Talgo, with passive tilting system
in Poland we have pendolino without "pendolino" function😄 of course poor infrastructure slow this train and there is no 25kV AC but 3kV DC
This is so full of facts I had never ever heard of. Many thanks.
The APT is like the Concorde, both way ahead of its time.
I pulled on my anorak and NHS specs and braced myself for the run-on sentences. Great stuff.
It is a sad story. I hope lessons have been learned.
It seems to me that the industrial management and governments in the UK often suffer from short-termism and lack of commitment. In contrast, the Japanese in particular often show great perseverance, even when initially presented with obstacles.
I rather think it's an example of sunken cost fallacy. By the time it was cancelled it was offering limited benefits over the existing alternative solutions, which were more reliable and cost less to maintain.
@@andrewreynolds4949 like what the hst? Nope electrification of the ecml came after. Railtrack then failed to complete the wcml upgrade and trains still can't do 140 on the wcml.
@@damiendye6623 Yes, like the HST and later the IC 225. Speeds over 125 now require in-cab signaling anyway; apparently there's not a tremendous savings on most of the WCML (especially in the south where it's busiest). The real solution for faster speeds is something like HS2, and even that doesn't save a whole lot of time (it mostly just makes capacity as a huge grade separation for the fast trains).
@@andrewreynolds4949 the ic225 or formally known as class91 and mk4 are based off the apt. They even had provision to retrofit tilt. Hence the shape.
While the HST was a success it was just 2 locos either end hence why it was able to perform better.
And the apt did have capt which was kinda early in cab signalling as it gave apt specific details that other trains didn't get
@@damiendye6623 The fundamental idea was that a design with tilting and an equivalent design without tilting did not have significantly different levels of performance. I am told the final production APT concepts, much more reliable but also more conservative in design, were similar to the IC 225, with a power car on one end and a DVT on the other. Essentially the 225 sets were designed from lessons of the APT project, but without tilt function.
When the final APT design was prepared for production they looked at the cost-effectiveness before ordering it, and they found that the performance improvement was minimal in comparison to the additional maintenance and reliability cost added by the tilt function. They then cancelled the APT project in favor of more conventional design. Despite not being a true expert on the subject I rather agree with the decision.
❤❤❤Your channel is literally my comfort place. You make me so happy. 😁❤
As a motorcyclist I find this quite an interesting idea. I wonder if satnav. would have been useful for knowing about the next bend? That might have been a way to remove the delay in responding to a bend. Another idea might have been to have liquid that could move from one side of the train to the other.
Modern trains always know where they are just from their interaction with the infrastructure so it's simply a matter of consulting a map of the route. Of course for that you need reliable and reasonably inexpensive mobile computers which just didn't exist in the early 80s. These days it's a solved problem.
There was no such thing as SatNav/GPS at the time this train was developed, tested, and finally scrapped. The necessary small, fast computers didn’t exist either - computers were big, slow, and clunky, and couldn’t communicate with each other, let alone (non-existing) GPS satellites. A 50mb hard drive was the size of a washing machine!
As a motorcyclist I always found it ridiculous that the boss of the Can-Am motorcycle company which produced a motorbike with 2 wheels at the front instead of one said that the reason why the bike didn't have a tilting mechanism was because it wasn't natural to lean into corners. I mean, had this guy even ridden a motorbike before?
@@B-A-L Bloody hell! I’m not a biker, but thinking of getting a ‘reverse’ trike (got a balance problem). It won’t be a CanAm no I know this. Bloody hell, when I’m driving my car, I lean myself into corners in my seat!!!!! Anyone who’s ever ridden a push bike knows about leaning!
an active ballast system based on liquids is a novel idea for a train tilt..but the volume needed to alter the cg would have been difficult in practice to shift, and to where? tanks on the sides ? regards
I was really wishing for this video, thank you for this lovely documentary about these trains. I think they are awesome.
Thanks for posting this. 👍
A perfect example of how political dogma and lack of foresight stifles British imagination and skill with the result that instead of APT becoming successful and exportable we end up importing the technology instead!
It is amazing the APT did so well in the light of underfunding and government antagonism towards rail travel generally.
At the time many countries in Europe (France, Spain, Germany etc.) were investing heavily in rail infrastructure and now have superb high speed networks that improve their economies.
Meanwhile the UK still has the commercial and safety failures of privatisation to sort out and infrastructure improvements anywhere north of London are years in the future and continually being reduced in scope.😡
Stop voting Tory. They don’t give a shit about you
The uks railways are the safest in Europe, you have no idea what you’re talking about, British rail routinely made terrible decisions and was basically managed decline of the railways.
@@youreafurry8818 I agree but Potters Bar was on my mind when I wrote this when safety was compromised for the government’s ideology privatisation.
From what I can see the APT still adhered to some fundamental design flaws, and would have needed a lot more work to really sort out the problems. The Italians were already working on their own somewhat successful tilting train design, and eventually they looked at what went wrong with the APT to further improve their own design.
As for infrastructure outside London, I would point to Scotland's rather all-encompassing long-term plan that was set in motion not long ago.
I worked for rail track for a couple of years as a data analyst. Total joke... they spent £40m on an asset register, written internally as Access 2 database. They'd been operating a "fix it when it's broke" policy on signal light bulbs. Yep... stuff you can buy for less than the price of a sandwich. Then... someone in the government made the connection between a terrible accident that killed a bunch of people. Some things are critical. They demanded an asset maintenance system that replaced such things before they break, and rail track developed a register that a) was inaccurate and b) had no functionality relating to maintenance. That's £40 million.
They got a slap on the wrist and had to start again. The rail maintainers, take the job sheets for the day, sit down with management and tick off most of the work items for the day, without even inspecting them, they know they can get away with it.
I've even known senior engineers resign after closing sections of track as unsafe... when their shifts ended a junior engineer would be told to reopen the line with a speed restriction. Another very senior engineer, a contractor, managed to get contracts with both Rail track and one of the maintainers. All told an illegal conflict of interest as he was responsible for signing off work performed by a maintainer on behalf of rail track. He was pulling in over £1500 a day. He was fired without prosecution.
One morning when I got to work there'd been an accident where a train mounted a platform and killed loads of people. Our lead engineer was able to guess the problem correctly in seconds, incompetence and bad management. A simple job left unfinished. The enquiry took years, cost millions and achieved nothing.
APT: A good idea, poorly applied...
It really was a good idea, but wouldn't have been necessary with more investment in infrastructure.
No amount of investment, within reason, can negate the curves on the WCML, hence the Pendolinos.
@@nkt1 well, no investment short of a full scope HS2, which is currently struggling to meet the scope it was first designed with, let alone a full vision of a high speed corridor all the way to Glasgow and Edinbruh
@@nkt1 They do it in other countries why not here
@@seansands424 Other countries build dedicated high-speed lines, as straight as possible, using tunnels if necessary and with the track on any curves canted for fast trains. The WCML carries mixed traffic and was built long ago, taking the easiest and cheapest route.
@@seansands424 But they ARE doing it over there...
Very well told story, but quite a sad story, and to think if we had just managed to fund the project properly Britain would have once again pioneered new technology
Classic example of the powers that be’s unerring ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of success.
This story reminds me of the British Motorcycle Industry, especially the story of the Triumph Trident/ BSA Rocket 3, another example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Google: Triumph Trident - Ahead of the Curve, to see a case study of why the original British Motorcycle Industry collapsed
I remember seeing the APT-P power cars being built at Derby on an open day in the late 70's. All six of them in the same workshop at the same time.
When I working on a overhead bridge in Warrington cheshire.Big contract. They were testing the tilt train every single day.
Great job I was just 17.. lines were so dangerous being electrifide we held that train up many times due to the bridge build. Line being turned of for safety The contractor was AF budge... That tilt train used to get stuck true the tilt you could hear the rumble. It was obvious that tilt train was never going work. Money to was just astronomical then scrap yard job disgusting. Days like that I wish I had my camera.
Love the opening photo. taken at my home town of Lancaster where I was born in 1943. Most of my photos are of steam back in the 1950/60s; if only we had videos back then
So ASLEF (trade Union for non UK viewers) wanted to stop the project when they saw it only had one drivers seat, sounds depressingly familiar?
Add another seat. Sounds simple to me.
Imagine how good the railways could be without these dinosaur unions
@@Bungle-UK And on the other end, imagine how bad the working conditions could be without them. There has to be a balance.
@@michlo3393 it was an experimental train only driven by engineers. But was used to create a national strike.
Great little video. Good to see somebody looked at classic Dillinja production
I love the look of the APT I wish I could afford the latest OO Gauge model.
Love your style of video mate. Well written and informative. As fellow a train/car/plane/military hardware enthusiast, I find your vids very enjoyable. Keep up the great content mate.
p.s. would love to see a video about the class 47s and/or 37s
F.Y.I. Tokyo - Shin Osaka by Shinkansen: 4 hours in 1964, 3 hｒ 10 min from Nov. 1965 after track settlements, 2 hr 30 min in 1995.
That huge model of APT, I'd love that in my house! Thats pure train Inception, a train within exactly the same train
So when they decided to show the train off properly they did it on an unelectrified line and had to push it with a diesel locomotive? It's a historic location, sure, but wouldn't it have been smarter to let the new shiny train move under its own power?
This actually reminds me of something. Every ICE in Germany is named after a city, and they are usually taken into service at the station of the city they're named after. So when Goslar was chosen as the name of a brand new ICE 3, it had to get there. One problem, Goslar doesn't have an electrified station. This high speed train, which Deutsche Bahn uses as a symbol of climate friendly travel, was pushed into the station by a diesel engine. Even the ceremony at the station acknowledged that this was slightly silly. Oh, and this was in 2017.
I feel like the Goslar bit was silly, but not really malicious. Pushing it there once by diesel isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. It brought some attention, but didn't cause more than some bemused headshaking.
The APT was a lot worse when it comes to public perception.
The issue with running it on electric power is those sort of large rail events are usually held in places that are not electrified. It wasn't so much they chose a place to unveil it as they took it to a show to display. They still have similar Rail Live shows annually, on a large site which is mostly not electrified.
@@andrewreynolds4949 It's surprising that so much of EU and UK rails are not electrified at this point. I'm sure that progressives have been fighting for more electrification for years. It gets more urgent all the time (along with sustainable generation of course).
@@emjayay I'm not surprised at all, considering here in America there's very little electrification at all. In any case there's not much incentive to electrify a yard of tertiary importance, like the kind they can get available for rail shows and events
The line in question was shildon the birth place of uk rail and it was shown as part of anniversary proceeding with trains past and present at the time. It's now the site of the shildon museum which is part of the nrm
A prime example of what happens when you let bean counters tamper with Engineering.
The APT was typical of Britain at the time - the requirement to get products on the market without adequate development. This killed the motorcycle industry and, later, our car industry.
The tilting train was conceived in the US in 1939, finally abandoned in the UK in 1985.
So typical of Britain at the time.
Japan had a working tilting train in full service in the 1970s and still does, even including a bullet train!
Bureaucrats or any government official should have no say over engineering problems.
As soon as I heard British Leyland, I thought oh dear……..
It was the right train at the wrong time. We weren’t ready for something like that in stodgy early 1980’s Britain. Although BR didn’t help themselves either. Instead of doing it properly and ironing out the flaws with prolonged testing, they rushed it into service and paid the price with that disastrous press junket from Glasgow to London.
It was the right train at the right time it was the wrong government
British Leyland Gas Turnines had a lot of experience with gas turbine road vehicles including dacing cars. One of its constituent companies, Rover, built Whittle's jet engine during WW2 and after the war they looked at using a gas turbine to power a car.
Once the 1973 fuel crisis occurred the gas turbine APT was a non-starter and all further work was done on the 27kV electric version, thus APT-P. But APT-E had very little trouble with its ten turbines once they were run-in and sorted, and they produced enough power to reach 152.3 mph, a record which STILL stands for non-electric trains in the UK, and to get from London to Leicester on less than an hour!
@@seansands424 that’s actually a very good point.
@@kitspackman3994 I was writing my comment slightly tongue in cheek!! I must admit, BL do get unfairly maligned in some respects.
The APT, TSR2, Harrier (leaving aside the GR1/3/FRS1) - all examples of things we made/built but didn't properly develop/exploit thus had to buy from elsewhere, namely - as you said - Pendolino trains, the McD F4 Phantom K/M (in RAF/FAA parlance Phantom FG1 (FAA) and FGR2 (RAF) & post-GR3-era AV8B Harrier's (in RAF parlance, the GR5/GR7).
At least we did get however the Class-43 HST "InterCity" - like every third child I've still got my Hornby model in a box in my parents attic in the classic BR livery of c. 1986. Hasn't been used in at least 25 years.
By the time it was withdrawal the Class 370 was a pretty damn reliable trainset and very often was used to fill gaps left by broken down HSTs. BREL wasted time and money building the HST instead of focusing 100% on the APT programme. A diesel-electric conversion of the APT-E would have been a vastly better stopgap solution than the HST, while the aircraft like construction would have made the power cars vastly more crash worthy compared to the flimsy fibreglass bathtub that is the Class 43.
How could a diesel-electric version of the APT have been vastly superior to the HST, when the HST was already an excellent train? The APT was a very specialised and expensive design, whereas the HST was an evolution of existing technology; it was pretty rugged, could go anywhere and do almost anything. Equipping depots all over the country to handle the articulated bogies, hydro-kinetic brakes, tilt packs etc of 100+ APTs would have been a logistical and financial nightmare.
A good video-especially the prelude. Thatcher's governments knew better than to touch British Rail. That came later.
It's noticeable the APT-P tilts much more than the Pendolinos. I remember travelling on one from Preston to Carlisle, it was quite a queasy experience, I was only a young teenager so no alcohol consumed, and indeed our train was terminated at Carlisle due to one carriage not tilting in sync with the rest of the consist
Based on my knowledge the pendolino's tilt has been reduced during the years. While the first generation tilted up to 13/10 degrees now they tilt only up to 8
@@marcogentile3392 yeah, the experimental sets ETR Y 0160 and ETR 401 tilted up to 12°, commercial sets (from ETR 450 onwards) 8°
It was mentioned in the video that the APT's tilt was reduced & this resolved sickness issues.
It was determined that the sickness was caused by the brain being confused by seeing tilting but not feeling it. Reducing tilting meant you could feel a little tilt when you saw it.
The alcohol would have made it worse, but the first public run was started in darkness & nobody felt ill before they could see the horizon moving up & down.
It will never cease to amaze me how eager this country is to shoot itself in the foot.
A success story, the 125 HST train… still in use today! 🏴
And in the west country
At first I though ''yet another guy making same video about APT'', but this one is actually much more detailed than others and great
And she had so much potential.
Brilliant production yet again.
It was very similar to Metroliner of USA but not for tilting train but high speed The Metroliner couldn't have reached their full performance because they rushed
Lovely to see this old footage.
What a shame. Mismanagement, short sighted government and unions kills off british innovation and industry.
The nation that invented railways ...
I actually still prefer to travel on a 125 over the modern (Hitachi?) tilting trains due to the extra width making the seats more roomy!
I don’t believe the new IETs tilt. I definitely know that the ones ordered by Avanti West Coast will not tilt even though they are replacing tilting trains (Class 221 ‘Super Voyager’)
@@terrier_productions might be the Italian built ones then. Prefer the extra room over the tilting anyway!
@@terrier_productions yeah the newer hitachi trains dont tilt, none of them do, they are still more cramped on the inside than the HSTs though due to having much higher floors
The Bombardier class 221s and the Italian-built Alstom 390s (Pendolinos) both tilt. I don't believe any other tilting train operates in the UK.
@@andrewreynolds4949 yes, I know that.. I had a feeling that if I hadn’t mentioned which class was being replaced then they might have thought that I meant the Pendolinos
Any your right, only the 220s, 221s and 390s tilt if you’re not counting the last remaining APT-P and the APT-E
Thanks for this. I have a really strong memory of seeing this in a museum when I was a child, I thought it was Steamport in Southport but I guess it must have been a day trip to Crewe with my grandad. I think it was being used as a Cafe but that was a VERY long time ago so my memory could well be wrong.
I don't think that it would fit in Southport's wonderfully honest Lawnmower museum either. I'd like to see them try!