In the US, social media users were frightened by photographs of a Soviet jet train

A post appeared on the American social network Reddit discussing a high-speed laboratory car (SVL), created in the USSR. Despite the fact that the information was published just a few hours ago, users have already left more than a hundred comments.

“This is a pretty interesting idea… does anyone know if this actually worked?” one user wrote.

“It may be noisy, inefficient, expensive, impractical and unnecessary. But how I wish this existed! Well done, Russia!” another commented.

But there were also ironic reviews.

“Imagine the noise this thing made as it drove through the village. An absolutely stunning scientific experiment. The pinnacle of Soviet engineering is to simply attach two jet engines to a train and hope for the best,” noted another user.

In the late 1960s, Soviet engineers created one of the most unusual transport experiments – a high-speed laboratory car (SVL), equipped with two turbojet engines from the Yak-40 passenger aircraft. The task was ambitious: the USSR planned to launch a high-speed service between Moscow and Leningrad, but first it was necessary to understand how an ordinary carriage on rails would behave at speeds above 160 km/h.

Since in 1970 there was no locomotive capable of pulling a train faster than 230 km/h for a long time, engineers made the carriage self-propelled – they installed aircraft engines on the roof that pushed the train without rotating the wheels.

In 1971, on the Golutvin-Ozyory section of the Moscow Railway, SVL accelerated to 187 km/h. And in February 1972, on the Dnieper Railway, the car reached an estimated speed of 249 km/h, and according to some data, even 267-288 km/h.

Mass production of jet trains was abandoned due to enormous fuel consumption, monstrous noise and unprepared tracks. But the test results formed the basis for the creation of the first Soviet high-speed electric train ER200.

After the completion of the project, the SVL stood on the outskirts of the Tver Carriage Works for almost 30 years. In 2008, the bow with engines was restored and installed as a memorial stele on Constitution Square in Tver. Today, this monument recalls a bold experiment that was decades ahead of its time.

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