To succeed in life, there is little desire and talent. We still have to be born under a lucky star. Or, more simply, to be in the right place at the right time.
Many inventions remained unrealized for the reason that they were ahead of their time, came into conflict with the technical and technological capabilities of the era. It is to such inventions that the ball train of the Russian engineer Nikolai Grigorievich Yarmolchuk belongs.
Wheels are knocking, trains are going …
Nikolai Grigorievich Yarmolchuk began his career as a fitter on the Kursk railway in Moscow. He all liked his work, but it was painfully a lot of noise: the knocking, the rumble of the carriage wheels on the rails.
Nikolai Grigorievich conceived to create a silent train. And in 1924 he came up with the idea that he could replace disc wheels with balls and run them along a chute instead of rails. Such a ball itself is both a rigid axle of a wheelset and a conical rolling surface in all directions.
And if it is made large enough, then the gyroscope effect will also be added: there will be not a carriage, but a carriage, which cannot be dropped. This means that the speed of a new type of transport can be enormous - as far as the engine power allows.
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Idea transformation
Initially, the inventor assumed that the ball itself would become a train car. It will have to accommodate the engine, control cabin, passengers and cargo on a stabilized, non-rotating platform. But after studying at the Moscow Higher Technical School and the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MPEI), the author got acquainted with the strict rules of design, became an engineer, a technically competent specialist.
And now his initial naive idea has taken on a more realistic outline. Yarmolchuk invented two-wheeled cars. Each wheel of his train was a large ball as tall as a man. The sides of the balls are cut off, the axles pass here and the electric motors are installed.
Two such balls, "shod" in rubber, are fixed in the head and tail of the cylindrical carriage. They are located inside the car, and only the lower part protrudes outward through the slots in the bottom. Instead of rails, there is a semicircular concrete tray, raised in some places on supports above the ground, and in others - enclosed by fences. The ball train, which had a streamlined shape and looked like a giant snake, was supposed to reach speeds of more than 300 kilometers per hour. Yarmolchuk provided in it, in addition to traditional, air brakes - retractable flaps.
Triumphal procession of BOSST
In 1929, Nikolai Grigorievich built a tiny model of a ball train at the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers. She made an indelible impression on the high authorities: the trailer was briskly rushing along the tray laid on the floor, dashingly passing the radii and not showing any desire to fly off to the side.
In the same year, under the People's Commissariat of Railways, the Bureau of Experimental Construction of Bullet Transport was created to develop and implement N. G. Yarmolchuk. In the spirit of the times, it received an abbreviation - BOSST. The designer was given a team of employees and the opportunity to implement his developments: to carry out laboratory experiments to study the mechanics of an extraordinary train, to design a full-size model.
In March 1931, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense of the USSR V. V. Kuibyshev got acquainted with the work of the bureau and experimental models. After that, in April of the same year, the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Railways decided to make the first experimental ball car and build a ball race track for it near the Severyanin station near Moscow.
A million rubles were allocated for the work, this money was used not only for salaries (89 engineers, technicians, carpenters and locksmiths who were building not yet a full-size concrete, but a wooden trough track), but also for setting up a vegetable garden.
The All-Union magazine Ogonyok wrote about this as follows: “We have created our own farm, planted a vast garden of 15 hectares, cabbage, carrots, potatoes grow here … Why cabbage? What is the use of a vegetable garden? The Soviet inventor and all his assistants should not lack anything. Let them work without extraneous worries."
Meanwhile, the press and radio launched a noisy campaign in support of the invention, and Yarmolchuk in numerous speeches tirelessly gave compelling arguments to prove the benefits of his brainchild. For example, from Moscow to Leningrad even the newest Red Arrow train takes 12 hours. And the spherical electrolysis train will cover this distance in two hours!
And it takes more than a week for a regular train to get to Vladivostok, and a little more than a day for an electric ball train. Building tracks for ball trains is easier and more economical: concrete trays can be cast in the factory and placed in sections on site. In addition, there will be great savings in metal, which is so necessary in other sectors of the national economy, since steel rails will become unnecessary. In a word, sheer benefit for the country!
In the belly of a blue-red snake
In April 1932, a one-fifth of its life size was manufactured, and six months later, a whole train of five such cars was made. The front car received a beautiful aerodynamic fairing, which made the train, sitting low over the trough track, look like a shiny blue and red snake.
During tests at the Severyanin station, the ball train rushed along the ball-track - a wooden electrified chute track - at a speed of up to 70 kilometers per hour. Although it was only a model, it could also accommodate passengers - two in each carriage, however, only … in a lying position, sitting on oilcloth cushions.
Correspondent of the Znanie - Sila magazine D. Lipovetsky, who made a trip in a ball train, described his feelings as follows: “Swaying softly and slightly noticeably, without the rumble and the usual iron clatter of wheels in trains, the ball train swallowed space. When cornering, he spontaneously bent over, maintaining balance. The rubber-clad balls spun silently, carrying the metal snake forward with great speed."
The global dream of an inventor
Having considered the test results, the expert council headed by Academician S. A. Chaplygin gave a very positive conclusion.
On August 13, 1933, the Council of People's Commissars, by its resolution, obliged the Commissariat of Railways to begin construction, as soon as possible, of an experimental-operational ball rolling road of "medium size", with reduced-size trains, with roller-skating rinks with a diameter of two meters and a speed of 180 kilometers per hour on the Moscow - Noginsk.
This experimental line with a length of fifty kilometers would connect the industrial districts of the Moscow region with the capital.
The construction of a road of "normal dimensions" for trains with ball rollers with a diameter of 3.7 meters and a speed of up to 300 kilometers per hour was postponed for the near future. Such a balloon express, moving along the tray at the speed of an aircraft, had to make regular flights between Moscow and Leningrad.
Yarmolchuk himself dreamed of a "powerful trough communication network throughout the country", and then around the world. Addressing the young readers of the Pioneer magazine, he wrote: "The balloon train was created in our country as the brainchild of October, and when you become adults, I am convinced that balloon tracks will be laid across the World Union of Soviet Republics."
The construction of the world's first trough road was planned to be completed in the fall of 1934, by the 17th anniversary of the October Revolution. But the construction didn't even start.
We counted - we got it
When the excitement and hype around the ball train subsided, the euphoria from the brilliant prospects of the "transport of the future" faded, and the harsh laws of economics imperiously declared themselves. Simply put, they began to count.
And we were convinced that the idea of rebuilding the entire rail track, replacing it for thousands of kilometers with reinforced concrete trays could only come to mind. flushed by politics. Those who asserted the economic benefits of the balloon trains forgot about the enormous costs, completely unbearable for the country at that time.
In addition, clearing the trough track from snow and ice would be a big problem - otherwise the train would fly off into space at high speed, like from a springboard. The quality of Soviet rubber in the 30-40s of the last century was, to put it mildly, not brilliant. And there was not enough of it, sometimes up to half of the trucks in the motor vehicle fleet were “barefoot”. There is no time for rubberized rollers! And how much rubber on them would have served under a load of tens of tons on concrete trays ?!
In general, in terms of the amount of capital costs, the project turned out to be generally too heavy for the USSR. The inventor was ahead of his time. Nowadays, some of the ideas laid down in the ball train have found application not in a single project, but, so to speak, individually. In many countries, there are metro trains on rubberized wheels; high-speed trains are given streamlined "airplane" shapes. Air brakes invented by Yarmolchuk in addition to the usual ones in the form of raised brake flaps have long become common not only in aviation.
So, maybe it makes sense to revive this long-standing, but now well-forgotten project?
Valery NIKOLAEV