In Britain we tend to lag behind the rest of the world with regards to advances in mass transit systems. Japan has had the bullet train since the mid 1960s as well as more recently the MAGLEV in China and South Korea while we drag our feet with the implementation of connecting our capital with the rest of the country using a high speed rail network. This lag does however betray a national rail engineering pedigree; Stephenson is the “father of the railways”building the world’s first public railway while the first commercial MAGLEV line ran at Birmingham airport, owing its existence to Professor Eric Laithwaite. One other lesser known rail project is the George Bennie‘Railplane’ of 1929 based in Milngavie, south of Glasgow.
