Riding into the sunset: Futuristic trains that were never built

Thinking about Japan’s magnetic levitation train of the future (34 years from now to be exact), Eric Jaffe writes about some “far-flung railway visions of the past” in The Infrastructurist. First up is a vacuum tube that would whisk passengers from Boston to New York at 1,200 miles per hour. Rocket scientist Robert Goddard came up with the concept in 1904 when writing a freshman English paper on the theme Traveling in 1950. Also of note is the Rail Zeppelin, a 1931 German propeller-driven train that never made it past the prototype stage. Link to full story in The Infrastructurist.

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