Safety. Rapidity. Cheapness. Only three words, but they accurately describe the requirements for the projects of inventors who tried to improve the railway mode of transport.
Some may be outraged that developers are being pushed into the box. But since the opening of the first railway, there have been many developments that required cash investments. But state funding is not rubber, so one cannot do without appropriate restrictions.
Let's talk about one such unsuccessful experiment of Soviet engineers.
Back in the twenties, the talented inventor N. G. Yarmolchuk (a graduate of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University and the Moscow Aviation Institute) began work on a high-speed electric train that could reach a speed of 300 km / h.
Development engineer N. G. Yarmolchuk
In 1924, Yarmolchuk came to the conclusion that the railway tracks and traditional train wheels were not credible. He believed that hitting the wheels against the rails at high speed could destroy the wheel and disaster would ensue. Therefore, he decided to replace the usual rails with a special roundish groove, and the wheels with special balls that would correspond to the diameter of the groove.
The self-directionality of the balls in the process of movement and the absence of "stress" are the main advantages of such a path system.
The car he designed had an original chassis: a pair of large balls were placed at the back and front of the car. There were electric motors inside the wheel, and suspension elements in the side parts.
Promotional video:
A ball train is a monorail train designed by engineer N. Yarmolchuk. Image taken from open sources.
In 1929, a Soviet track engineer built a small model of a ball train and demonstrated it at the Institute of Transport Engineers in Moscow.
In 1931, the Soviet People's Commissariat decided to release a prototype of a ball wagon and prepare a special rounded trough for it - a ball race track. A million rubles were allocated for the implementation of the project and about a hundred engineers were involved.
The test site was chosen near the Severyanin station in the Moscow region. In order to save money, the first track was made of wood; its length was three kilometers.
In 1932, on a scale of 1: 5, they assembled a train with cylindrical ball wagons and wheels one meter in diameter. The length of one carriage was equal to seven meters. The ball train made a soft (in comparison with the usual rattling and metal rattling of the wheels on the rails) "walk" at a speed of 70 km / h. along an electrified ball race track, which consisted of a pair of closed rings. During the tests, there were passengers inside the cars. Due to its small size, each carriage could accommodate no more than two people, who settled in it lying on a mattress.
In 1933, based on the results of successful tests, it was decided to start building a track from Moscow to Noginsk. But the production of the new "Sharoline" was never started.
SHELT Project - Electric Shaft Transport.
The repeated examination revealed a number of significant shortcomings.
- The difficulty of laying rounded reinforced concrete gutters.
- High quality materials were required for the production of ball wheels. Hard to reach in the USSR.
- Snow and ice that collected inside the road gutters.
A bold and promising idea shattered in the face of harsh reality. The project remained at the stage of a test site, and Yarmolchuk went down in history forever as the unlucky inventor of the world's first high-speed electric train.